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More "Slough" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... opportunity, made it possible for some people to right their matrimonial and social infelicities; whereas for others, because of dullness of wit, thickness of comprehension, poverty, and lack of charm, there was no escape from the slough of their despond. They were compelled by some devilish accident of birth or lack of force or resourcefulness to stew in their own juice of wretchedness, or to shuffle off this mortal coil—which under other circumstances had such glittering possibilities—via the rope, the knife, the ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... myself by showing how anxious I was to get it. And you know I could not have explained all this before him and you. You would have thrown up the stall in disgust." Would that he had! That was Mark's wish now,—his futile wish. In what a slough of despond had he come to wallow in consequence of his folly on that night at Gatherum Castle! He had then done a silly thing, and was he now to rue it by almost total ruin? He was sickened also with all these lies. His very soul was dismayed by the ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... through even the reforms thus far enumerated, it would make us feel as if we had been lifted from a slough and placed on a plateau abounding in air and sunlight; but if we stopped with this, we should leave much to be desired. There are still more pressing measures to ...
— Social Justice Without Socialism • John Bates Clark
... world, ancestors, chance, and society therefrom, involves nothing less than to be precisely this CAUSA SUI, and, with more than Munchausen daring, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the slough of nothingness. If any one should find out in this manner the crass stupidity of the celebrated conception of "free will" and put it out of his head altogether, I beg of him to carry his "enlightenment" a step further, ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... on its back, the wings glued to one of the eddies, its limbs feebly quivering; a fish arises, and it is gone. Lower down the stream, I can see over a knoll the green and damp turf roofs of four or five hovels, built at the edge of a morass, which is trodden by the cattle into a black Slough of Despond at their doors, and traversed by a few ill-set stepping stones, with here and there a flat slab on the tops, where they have sunk out of sight;—and at the turn of the brook I see a man ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... contribution of one dollar, he did nothing else but cavil and deplore. He inveighed against the low standards of the masses, and went on his way sadly, making all the money he could at his private calling, and keeping his hands clean from the slime of the political slough. He was a censor and a gentleman; a well-set-up, agreeable, quick-witted fellow, whom his men companions liked, whom women termed interesting. He was apt to impress the latter as earnest and at the same time fascinating—an alluring ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... cave a deep bass voice replied: 'Elesi-a-ah!' while at the same moment the tench sprang from the cave, and, champing its jaws, wriggled and wriggled back to the slough." ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... fool's paradise of luxury and riot, never looking down but to squeeze from them an extra drop of honey— like sheep-boys stuffing themselves with blackberries while the sheep are licking up flukes in every ditch? And now you wish to leave the poor man in the slough, whither your neglect and your example have betrayed him, and made his too apt scholarship the excuse for your own remorseless greed! As a Christian, I am ashamed of you all; as a Churchman, doubly ashamed of those prelates, hired stalking-horses of the rich, who would fain gloss over their ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... said. "You had to go through it, your slough of despond. It lies across every path—that leads to anywhere. ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... now that unless a man is prepared to discard every western usage, to slough off his inherited cast of thought, to renounce his faith, wholly and finally to abandon his country and his father's house, his flight is but the blind expedient of cowardice or pride. Here and there may be born one who can so cut himself ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... concerning him; and it was even longer before she was sufficiently calm to comprehend me. Never did unhappy parents before experience greater bitterness of soul. I strove to comfort her, but she would not listen to my words; for oh, they were as the blind leading the blind; we both were struggling in the slough of despair—both were in the pit of dark, bewildering misery. We sometimes sat looking at each other, like criminals whose last hour is come; and even when our grief wore itself into a "calm sough," there was something in our silence as dismal and more ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... this region of the Columbia was named Wappatoo Island by the explorers. This is a large extent of country lying between the Willamette and an arm of the Columbia which they called Wappatoo Inlet, but which is now known as Willamette Slough. It is twenty miles long and from five to ten miles wide. Here is an interesting description of the manner of gathering the roots of the wappatoo, of which we have heard so much ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... impure love. I repeat: There is no impure love. The impurity is in the mortal mind of man, obstructing his vision until he fails to see the purity of that which fain would lift him from the Slough of Despond to the ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... Listen to me. I have been your friend. I am willing to remain so. Come to me as before, and you shall find me as I have ever been—affectionate and kind. Avoid me—place yourself in the condition of my opponent, and beware. In a moment, by one word, I can throw you back into the slough from whence I dragged you. To-morrow morning, if I so will it, you shall wander forth again, an outcast, depending for your bread upon a roadside charity. It is a dreadful thing to walk a marked and branded man through this cold world; yet it is only for me to say the word, and infamy ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... has come to the Prince the man who owns the marsh! He knows the firm ground. Cope does not know that it is there! Cope thinks that it is all slough! This man swears that he can and will take us across, one treading behind another. It's settled. When sleep seems to wrap ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... a half-baked notionist as I am. We are here in a most pleasant country, full of walks, and idle to our heart's desire. Taylor has dropped the "London." It was indeed a dead weight. It had got in the Slough of Despond. I shuffle off my part of the pack, and stand, like Christian, with light and merry shoulders. It had got silly, indecorous, pert, and everything that is bad. Both our kind remembrances to Mrs. K. and yourself, and strangers'-greeting to Lucy,—is it Lucy, or Ruth?—that ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... with his own straight running-iron, as it were, writing over again the brand he wished to change; but this was clumsy and apt to be detected, for the new wound would slough and look suspicious. A piece of red-hot hay wire or telegraph wire was a better tool, for this could be twisted into the shape of almost any registered brand, and it would so cunningly connect the edges of both that the whole mark would seem to be one scar ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... resource is to take service with people only a step or two above the poorest class, with whom they fare scantily, endure harsh treatment, lead shifting and precarious lives, and finally drop into the slough of evil, through which, in their best estate, they do but pick ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Astronomy: it was he who first discovered the seventh primary planet, which he named, in honor of King George the Third, the Georgium Sidus. George the Third took him under his especial patronage, and constituted him his astronomer, with a handsome pension. He resided at Slough, near Windsor, where ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... great astonishment, that it contained a printed pamphlet. We were all curious to see what sort of a pamphlet such a person would read; what it could contain that he seemed to have had such a care about. For the slough in which it was rolled was fine chamois leather; what colour it had been could not be known. But the pamphlet was wrapped so close together, and so damp, rotten, and yellow that it seemed one solid piece. We all concluded from some words that we ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... to me to be a fitting opportunity to explain how such a union is not only consistent with, but necessitated by, sound logic. I purposed to lead you through the territory of vital phenomena to the materialistic slough in which you find yourselves now plunged, and then to point out to you the sole path by which, in my judgment, ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... river lay the Horsehoe slough, a crescent of glistening silver, over which wild ducks circled and skimmed and then sank into its clear waters, splashing riotously, as if they, too, were holding an "Old Boys' Reunion." It was the close season for wild fowl, and nobody knew ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... which would have been thrown away upon the melodramatic subjects which Verdi had hitherto affected. Much of his music is really graceful and refined, but his efforts to avoid vulgarity occasionally land him in the slough of sentimentality. Nevertheless, the pathos which characterises some of the scenes has kept 'La Traviata' alive, though the opera is chiefly employed now as a means of allowing a popular prima donna to display her high ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... life. If you two girls, Laura and Edith, had made the matches you might, we should still be living on the avenue. But I certainly cannot permit you now to spoil every chance of getting out of this slough. You may not be able to do as well as you could have done, but if you are once called ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... day; with every one declaring that it had been a great treat. Larry kept the two drumsticks as well as the wings of the gobbler. Possibly he might many a time feel a queer little sensation creeping up and down his spinal column as memory carried him back again to that slough, where the treacherous black mud was slowly but surely ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... their knees. More than once Jack could not help fearing that his guide had made a mistake, and that he was leading him into dangerous country; but he did not wish to show any suspicion of his judgment, and made no remark. Again the horses rose up out of the slough across which they had been wading and enjoyed for a short time some hard ground; but they soon had to leave it, to wade on as before. On every side was heard the loud croaking of frogs; their heads ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... engynes Swylke knew but fewe Sarazynes— * * * "A prys tour stood ovyr the Gate; He bent his engynes and threw thereate A great stone that harde droff, That the Tour al to roff * * * "And slough the folk that therinne stood; The other fledde and wer nygh wood, And sayde it was the devylys ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... wood-ashes) "and a tub full of fresh milk, and as many whips as a boy can carry in his arms,—and have all these brought into your bed-chamber. Then, when the Lindworm tells you to shed a shift, do you bid him slough a skin. And when all his skins are off, you must dip the whips in the lye and whip him; next, you must wash him in the fresh milk; and, lastly, you must take him and hold him in your arms, if it's only ...
— East of the Sun and West of the Moon - Old Tales from the North • Peter Christen Asbjornsen
... He was tired, and absorbed in his new possessions. It was good to sit down in his study, and spread his treasures out on the broad table, and gloat over them. A clump of damp moss rested quietly on his new sermon, "The Slough of Despond," but he took no note. He was looking for a place to put this curious little lizard in, and after anxious thought selected the gilt celluloid box, lined with pink satin, which the Mission Circle had given him on Christmas for his collars and cuffs. He felt, vaguely, that it was ...
— "Some Say" - Neighbours in Cyrus • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... side of the knoll, it was found that the line crossed a slough,—or "slew," as the old man termed it,—which lay in a long, winding hollow of the hills. This morass was partly filled with stagnant water; and the old man gave ...
— The Young Surveyor; - or Jack on the Prairies • J. T. Trowbridge
... "Scrape, hobble, slough, quagmire, hot water, hornet's nest; sea-, peck of troubles: pretty kettle of fish; pickle, stew, imbroglio mess, ado; false position; set fast, stand; dead,-lock,-set; fix, horns of a dilemma, cul de sac; hitch; ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett
... either hor. 3.4, dipping to the north-west or hor. 8.2, dipping to the south-east.) A clayey soil mixed with spangles of mica covered the rock, to the depth of three feet. Travellers suffer from the dust in winter, while in the rainy season the place is changed into a slough. On descending the table-land of Buenavista, about fifty toises to the south-east, an abundant spring, gushing from the gneiss, forms several cascades surrounded with thick vegetation. The path leading to the spring is so steep that we could touch with ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... said the Queen, amused. "What of that? Thy name is not Cis, is it? 'Tis only the slough that serves thee for the nonce. The good youth will find himself linked to some homely, housewifely Cis in due time, when the Princess Bride is queening it in France or Austria, and will own that the well was ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... minute precision with which he examined every object. A striking illustration of the fact that an object is frequently not seen, FROM NOT KNOWING HOW TO SEE IT, rather than from any defect in the organ of vision, occurred to me some years since, when on a visit at Slough. Conversing with Mr. Herschel on the dark lines seen in the solar spectrum by Fraunhofer, he inquired whether I had seen them; and on my replying in the negative, and expressing a great desire to see them, he mentioned the extreme difficulty he had had, ...
— Decline of Science in England • Charles Babbage
... earth's troubles to that? One vision of unseen things, rushing in, made small all the things that are seen. The poor old cripple, deformed and diseased, whose days must have been long a burden to her, was going even now to drop the slough of her mortality and to take on her the robes of light and the life that is all glory. What if my own life were barren for a while; then comes the end! What if I must be alone in my journey; I may do the Master's work all the way. And this is His work; to set the captive ...
— Daisy in the Field • Elizabeth Wetherell
... down in the slough of its eternal despond, a few lorn and desolate-looking men stood on the platform. There they were once more, as if it were but yesterday, with their hands deep down in their pockets; the wistful, curious glance in their eyes, ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... up to Alida's room to help her sort and address them. "You certainly have your share this year," she said, laughing. "Do you remember what a slough of despond you were in ...
— Cicely and Other Stories • Annie Fellows Johnston
... there was always too much rain or else too little. It was either drought or flood. Dark swarms of wild ducks were in all the ponds; V-shaped flocks of geese and brants screamed overhead, and down in the slough cranes danced a ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... self. He fell on his knees and thanked God for this crowning mercy. From his heart went forth a hymn of praise for the first time in long weeks. The words of the Man of Sorrows had lifted him above the slough. The marvel of it! How could he ever thank Him enough? His whole life should now be devoted to setting forth the wonders of His grace. When he arose he felt at peace with himself and full of goodwill to every one. He could even think of Mrs. Hooper calmly—with pity ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... of horror more insufferable than the first rush of her disgust. The thought of having to wake every morning with this weight on her breast roused her tired mind to fresh effort. She must find some way out of the slough into which she had stumbled: it was not so much compunction as the dread of her morning thoughts that pressed on her the need of action. But she was unutterably tired; it was weariness to think connectedly. She lay back, looking about the poor slit of a room with a renewal of physical ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... author's chief contribution to literature without a severe sense of disappointment. The book is brilliant almost without a rival in its best passages, but these are comparatively few, and they are divided from one another by tracts of pathless desert. The narrative sometimes descends into a mere slough of barbarous names, a marish of fabulous genealogy, in which the lightest attention must take wings to be supported at all. For instance, the geographical and historical account of the Ten Tribes occupies a space equivalent ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... Commissioners of Police having issued orders that several officers of the detective force shall be stationed at Paddington to watch the movements of suspicious persons, going by the down train, and give notice by the electric telegraph to the Slough station of the number of such suspected persons, and dress, their names (if known), also the carriages in ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... national good. They work separately, or too much as individuals. It is only the leavening of these institutions with a large spirit of the national destiny that will lift Britain . . . out of its present material slough." (The Outlook, November 17, 1906.) These words are almost a paraphrase of Mr. Wells' ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... humanize the rugged beasts and teach the forests to listen? No, these are wild, unmeaning fables. It was woman, charming woman, that led unpolished man forth from the forests and the dens, and taught him to bend before thy shrine, humanity! See how the face of nature changes! Where late the slough mantled, or the serpent hissed among the briars and the reeds, all is pasture and fertility. The cottages arise. The shepherds assume the guise of gentleness and simplicity. They attire themselves with care, they braid the garland, and they tune the pipe. Wherefore ...
— Imogen - A Pastoral Romance • William Godwin
... While stumbling through this Slough of Despond, he was called to Washington by his patent lawyer. Not having enough money to pay the cost of such a journey, he borrowed the price of a return ticket from Sanders and arranged to stay with a friend in Washington, to save a hotel bill that he could not afford. At ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... name with joy and mighty shouts they bless; The rest allow his choice, and fortune praise, New vigor blushed through those looks of his; It seemed he now resumed his youthful days, Like to a snake whose slough new changed is, That shines like gold against the sunny rays: But Godfrey most approved his fortune high, And wished ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... today for more faith in a way out of the slough of despond, more resolute endeavor to improve social and economic conditions. We beg the leaders of public opinion to pause before they condemn the efforts making to teach those means of social control ...
— Euthenics, the science of controllable environment • Ellen H. Richards
... Belle, a fine boat, one of my children was taken with croup. Dr. N——, a Universalist minister, got off at Dubuque and bought medicine for me. This saved the child, but he was sick all the way. We were stuck in Beef Slough for several days. I never left the cabin as my child needed me, but some time during the first day a boat from St. Paul was stuck there too, so near us that passengers passed from one boat to the other all day. It was only when I got to Hastings, where I had thought to meet my husband ...
— Old Rail Fence Corners - The A. B. C's. of Minnesota History • Various
... a feeling of general sickness, chilliness and some fever. The skin over the sore part is hot and painful. The several dead parts may run together until the entire mass separates in a slough. In favorable cases it proceeds to heal kindly, but in severe cases it may spread to the surrounding tissues and end fatally, sometimes by the absorption of putrid materials, or by the resulting weakness. It runs usually from ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... will think sometimes, as I shall think always, that we might have lived innocently and happily in New England, forgetting and forgotten by the rabble we left behind us, having shaken off the slough of an unhappy life, beginning the world again, under new names, in a new climate and country. It was a guilty dream to entertain, perhaps; but I shall dream it often enough in a strange land, among strange faces and strange manners—shall dream of you on ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... which then made the lowest social strata a hell upon earth; sacrificing his last chances of health and life to put down with a strong hand the robbers who infested the streets of London; and clinging with affection to his wife and children. He never got fairly clear of that lamentable slough of despond into which his follies had plunged him. His moral tone lost what delicacy it had once possessed; he had not the strength which enabled Johnson to gain elevation even from the temptations which then beset the unlucky 'author by profession.' ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... much as "Thank you." She put the shawl round her mistress, and then went slowly back. She sat down on the stone steps, and glared stupidly at the scene, and felt very miserable and leaden. She seemed to be stuck in a sort of slough of despond, and could not move in any direction to get out ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... severe attacks of melancholia. His 'miracles' attracting attention, he was brought before the Inquisition at Naples, as an impostor. He was sent to an obscure and remote monastery, and thence to Assisi, where he was harshly treated, and fell into Bunyan's Slough of Despond, ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... So the priests and the soldiers who in the Third Century had a modicum of worth themselves, sank and were submerged in the general slough of superstition and ignorance. It was a panic that continued for a thousand years, all through the endeavor of faulty men to make people good by force. At all times, up to within our own decade, ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... leaders who have formed the party of the fragment of free-minded men that still remains, marshal all the arguments of logic and political economy. They appeal to the pride, the decency of the men, to drag themselves from the slough into which they have fallen. The appeals are fervent, yet ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... call it—of being arrant asses," retorted the doctor, "and not having sense enough to know honest air from poison, and the dry land from a vile, pestiferous slough. I think it most probable—though, of course, it's only an opinion—that you'll all have the deuce to pay before you get that malaria out of your systems. Camp in a bog, would you? Silver, I'm surprised at you. You're less of a fool than many, take you ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... this for thirty years or more; yet if there's roast pork on the table, and I say a word to put him off it, he's that hurt as never was. Why, I'm only too glad to see him enjoying his food if no harm comes of it; but it's dreary work seeing your husband in the Slough of Despond, especially when it's your business to drag him out again, and most especially when you particularly warned him ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... right recollection, and my sleeping couch right meditation; these are the eight even and level roads by which to avoid the sorrows of birth and death. Those who come forth by these means from the slough, doing thus, have attained the end; such shall fall neither on this side or the other, amidst the sorrow-crowd of the two periods. The tangled sorrow-web of the three worlds by this road alone can be destroyed; this is my own way, unheard of before; by the pure eyes of the true law, impartially ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... and if it be suffered to lie on the skin many minutes is liable to produce a slough and consequent ulcer, and should therefore be mixed with flour when applied to cold extremities. Volatile alkali properly diluted might stimulate the skin ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... characteristic of the artist's designs are to be found in his illustrations to the "Waverley Novels." In one of these he shows us the illustrious Dominie at the moment, when reaching over to gather a water-lily, he falls souse into the Slough of Lochend, in which he forthwith became bogged up to the middle, his plight drawing from him of course his favourite ejaculation of amazement. By the assistance of some women the luckless Dominie was extracted from his position, justifying ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... makes concessions, or assents through good-nature, or goes abroad; who is not afraid of giving offense; "who answers you without supplication in his eye,"—in fact, who stands like a granite pillar amid the slough of life. You may wrestle with this man, he says, or swim with him, or lodge in the same chamber with him, or eat at the same table, and yet he is a thousand miles off, and can at any moment finish with you. He is a sheer ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... fate—my power thus ludicrously thwarted by a triviality. Within twenty-four hours I realized the danger to our campaign. I sent Woodruff post-haste to the widow. He gave her convincing assurances that she and her children were to be lifted from the slough of poverty into which Granby's drunkenness had thrust them. And in return she wrote at his dictation and issued an apparently uninspired public statement, exonerating me from all blame for her husband's reverses, and saying that ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... boys, at the proper moment, gave orders to fire upon the advancing enemy. The volley checked them, although they returned the compliment, and shot one of our party through the leg. Frank McCarthy then sang out, "Boys, make a break for the slough yonder, and we can have the ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... many dull would meanly scorn and the few wise nobly envy. For him love comes like a mighty wind of fire and burns his heart clean. He may have been stained and spotted in the slough of life, but when the woman comes ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... in his ear by unholy voices. He wakes, limp, exhausted, trembling, nauseated, and he feels as if he must choose between suicide and—more drink. If he drinks at this stage, he is lost; and then is the time to fix upon him and draw him by main force from the slough. ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... point of starting; he bribed his way on to the box and, seated in glory beside the driver, proclaimed aloud the downfall of the Corsican bandit and passed about the warm liquid joy. They clattered through Uxbridge, Slough, Maidenhead. Sleeping Reading was awakened by the great news. At Didcot one of the ostlers was so much overcome by patriotic emotions and the 1760 brandy that he found it impossible to do up the buckles of the harness. The night began to ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... for the nearest point on the Spirit River," she went on, "and headed southeast. After we had ridden for two hours we came to a slough of fresh water, and camped for the rest of the night to let the horses feed and rest. Nesis and I could not sleep. We ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... various sound, That death in pilgrimage I found, That I had perished of my wound - None cared which tale was true: And living eye could never guess De Wilton in his palmer's dress; For now that sable slough is shed, And trimmed my shaggy beard and head, I scarcely know me in the glass. A chance most wondrous did provide That I should be that baron's guide - I will not name his name! - Vengeance to God ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... within hearing, he would never have let his mother forget this speech. For had not she, the immaculate, the reprover, fallen herself into the slough of the vernacular? The fact is, it is easier to speak the truth in a patois, for it lies nearer to the simple realities than ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... at his ease, on the steep lap of danger, found that this hostility and the hostile person held his thoughts. A man may be an enthusiast in the cause of duty, he may have plucked from the hideous slough of war the rare blue flower of loving-kindness, he may in the strength of his convictions seem sufficient to himself; he will still feel a craving for sympathy. Colonel Sullivan was no exception. He found his thoughts dwelling ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... blocked up during a long time by carriers, neither of whom would break the way. It happened, almost every day, that coaches stuck fast, until a team of cattle could be procured from some neighbouring farm, to tug them out of the slough. But in bad seasons the traveller had to encounter inconveniences still more serious. Thoresby, who was in the habit of travelling between Leeds and the capital, has recorded, in his Diary, such a series of perils and disasters ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... began to come into use in January, 1845, between the railway station at Paddington, a western district of London, and Slough, near Windsor. The government eventually purchased all the lines, and reduced the charge on a despatch of twelve words to sixpence to any part of the United Kingdom. The Telephone followed (1876), and then ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... my own inexperience and mistake than to a want of skill or fidelity in my instructors. And thus for a time I was occupied by exploded systems, mingling, like an unadept, a thousand contradictory theories and floundering desperately in a very slough of multifarious knowledge, guided by an ardent imagination and childish reasoning, till an accident again changed the current of my ideas. When I was about fifteen years old we had retired to our house near Belrive, when we witnessed a most violent and terrible ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... mules. We crossed some rocky low hills, with scanty vegetation, and, after passing the cattle hacienda of San Jose, reached the plains of the same name, about two leagues in width, now dry and dusty, but in the wet season forming a great slough of water and tenacious mud, through which the mules have ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... resemblance the beauteous countenance of British liberty, are we to turn to them the shameful parts of our constitution? are we to give them our weakness for their strength, our opprobrium for their glory, and the slough of slavery, which we are not able to work off, to serve them ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... out of sight, dead in the body, in daily act, but living yet in spirit, and influencing the commonplace facts to which they have yielded the field, permeating the everyday routine with the ennobling power of lofty desires, and keeping the wayworn traveller from sinking into the slough of materialism or the quicksands of utter weariness. The man who in his youth dreamed of elevating his kind by a noble employment of the gifts of genius, may find that genius apparently useless, a hindrance even to prosperity, but he can ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... which was thrust upon the soul (or was it voluntarily assumed?)? This part of deity called individual soul certainly cannot be improved by its human conditions; and the question is not—"How soon can I pass through this slough of despond," but, "why was I thrust into it at all? Was it a mere sacred whim (tiruvileiadal) ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... Such scenes she had prayed never to be forced to desert—never desiring to bring her heart and imagination back to this dreary world, too like the gloomy coasts of Finland, where the slime and miry slough can only be escaped by scaling the naked granite of the solitary rocks. Fatigued with the massive statue she had sculptured, the Amazonian Lelia; wearied with the grandeur of an Ideal which it is impossible to mould from the ...
— Life of Chopin • Franz Liszt
... I, A plain rough gunner with one only pip. No doubt 'twas destined for some lofty soul Who in a deck-chair lolls, and marks the map And says, "Push here," while I and all my kind Scrabble and slaughter in the appointed slough. But I, presumptuous, wore it, till the gods Called for my laundry ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, October 31, 1917 • Various
... of it, my dear," begged Betty. The little happening—not so little, either, when one considers the possibility—had one good effect. It had raised Amy out of the slough of despond into which she had unwittingly strayed, or ...
— The Outdoor Girls of Deepdale • Laura Lee Hope
... asked herself whether, after all, the responsibility of this murder was not upon her. Even putting aside this painful doubt, she bore the name of the man who had savagely defied accountability and now, it seemed to her, was dragging her with him through the slough of blood and dishonor into which ...
— Whispering Smith • Frank H. Spearman
... destitution, and divorce, 330 Piety, faith, and state necessity, And how I loved the Queen!—and then I wept With the pathos of my own eloquence, And every tear turned to a mill-stone, which Brained many a gaping Pig, and there was made 335 A slough of blood and brains upon the place, Greased with the pounded bacon; round and round The mill-stones rolled, ploughing the pavement up, And hurling Sucking-Pigs into the air, With dust ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... last. She listened, still on her knees: "It is a common thing to say that suspense is worse to bear than certainty, but the certainty that destroys hope and makes the future a blank is very like a millstone hanged round a man's neck to sink him in a slough of despondency. I never really believed it until Dr. Courteney told me that if I wish to save my life it must be at the cost of my ambition; that I can never be an advocate, a teacher, a preacher; that I shall have ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... reaching the line there was something to get through—a swamp at least 1500 paces broad. One can hardly have an idea what this swamp was like, and how much trouble it cost us and our poor animals to get through it. This was a veritable 'Slough of Despond.' It was covered with water from one side to the other, and we had to wade through knee deep, and sometimes the water reached to our loins. The water was no serious obstacle, but the ground was of a morass-like nature ...
— In the Shadow of Death • P. H. Kritzinger and R. D. McDonald
... pursuits—he to boast!—when all that was asked of him was a kindly: "My poor fellow soul, you have indeed fought a hard fight; but there IS a God above us who will recompense you at His own time, take the word for it of one who has also been through the Slough of Despond." And then just these ... these hobbies of his, of which he had made so much. Now that he was alone with himself he saw them in a very different light. Lepidoptera collected years since were still unregistered, plants and stones unclassified; his poor ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... let thy own life be regulated. Allow not thyself to be led away by pleasures; shun, like the plague, the foolish familiarities thou seest between some men and women; harmless enough at first, but which by insidious degrees corrupt the heart, and thence lead it to negligence, and then into the vile slough of vice. Credit me, the greatest safeguard to female chastity is sobriety of demeanour. I beseech and direct that thou often call to mind the friendship which was betwixt us; but I do not wish thee to mourn ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... finest, newly spunne; And euery Seame the Nimphs shall sew With th' smallest of the Spinners Clue: And hauing done their worke, againe These to the Church shall beare her Traine: Which for our Tita we will make Of the cast slough of a Snake, 80 Which quiuering as the winde doth blow, The Sunne ...
— Minor Poems of Michael Drayton • Michael Drayton
... Ben Cohen's body was more completely his than one might have imagined. Jenny could, and indeed did, slough off her disguise on Sundays or rare summer days; but Ben and that self which was apart from music—that wildly-beating heart, pulsing blood, flooding warmth, grateful as the watchman's fire in the fog-sodden yard, that little fire over which he used to hang, warming his stiffened hands—were, ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... "he would say you were Christian floundering in the Slough of Despond, and deeming yourself one of its efts ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... thought was soon kicked in disgrace from his noble and well-disciplined mind. He resolved, that, let it cost what it might in the shape of loss of time and trial of temper, he would leave no stone unturned, and spare no pains, to deliver his friend of yesterday from the slough into which he was plunging. How he might best work for this end occupied his thoughts as ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... The vulture her carrion swallows, Returns to his vomit the dog. In the slough of uncleanliness wallows The he-goat, and revels the hog. Men are wise with their schools and their teachers, Men are just with their creeds and their priests; Yet, in spite of their pedants and preachers, They backslide ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... gather strength. And somehow even his straw-colored hair, so scanty, ill-grown and disheveled, looked less like the stubble it so much resembled. It was almost as though a latent, unsuspected strength were rousing within him, lifting him from the slough of despair by which he was so nearly submerged. It was as though the presence of his twins had drawn from him an acknowledgment of his duty, a sense which was so strongly and incongruously developed ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... influence was fast coming back. Already in his mind he was picturing himself telling Charlie all and with his help extricating himself from the slough into which he had sunk. How could he stand unmoved with that voice, familiar by many a memory of simple courageous goodness, again falling on his ear; and that appealing face, one so loved and delighted in, again turned ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... when they are old and picturesque, and smell of the Middle Ages; but to be kept a prisoner in one of them by rainy weather is apt to plunge a restless wanderer into the Slough of Despond. The chances are that the inn itself becomes at such times a slough, so that Bunyan's expression is then applicable in a real as well as in a figurative sense. There is a constant coming in and going out of peasants with dripping sabots, of dogs with wet paws, and draggle-tailed ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... the winter some way and then, while he was sitting in the train one day coming home, he overheard two men talking about turtles going up. Must have been two hotel men. Anyway, that gave Sam an idea and he started right in wading through Petersen's slough for turtles. Why, he pulled up barrels of them, and would you believe it, they sold in the city for real money! Sam went crazy—about as crazy as Mary Hagley got over her luck. And then along came rheumatism ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... on my heart, felt your cheek touch mine. Then and there I made a covenant with my soul; and no other man's arms shall ever enfold you. Ah, my Rosa Alba! I could dig your grave with my own hands, sooner than see that thief claim you. I am a proud man, and you have dragged me through the slough of humiliation, but to-day, as I bid you good-bye, I realize how one felt, who looking at the bust of him she loved supremely, said with her last breath: 'Voila mon univers, mon espoir, et mes dieux!' How soon we meet ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... eternal, indispensable books? To all to whom reading is something more than a refined idleness these questions recur, bringing with them the sense of bewilderment; and a still, small voice within us is for ever crying out for some guide across the Slough of Despond of an illimitable and ever-swelling literature. How many a man stands beside it, as uncertain of his pathway as the Pilgrim, when he who dreamed the immortal dream heard him "break out with a lamentable cry; saying, ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... at battles of spurs and other encounters. Sudden riches beget insolence, tumults, civic broils. Internecine quarrels, horrible tumults stain the streets with blood, but education lifts the citizens more and more out of the original slough. They learn to tremble as little at priestcraft as at swordcraft, having acquired something of each. Gold in the end, unsanctioned by right divine, weighs up the other forces, supernatural as they are. And so, struggling along their appointed path, making cloth, making ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... to you is the unerring judge, seems best, and be careless about the whimsies of such a half-baked notionist as I am. We are here in a most pleasant country, full of walks, and idle to our hearts desire. Taylor has dropt the London. It was indeed a dead weight. It has got in the Slough of Despond. I shuffle off my part of the pack, and stand like Xtian with light and merry shoulders. It had got silly, indecorous, pert, and every thing that is bad. Both our kind remembrances ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... and continued at her task nearly ten minutes, when she was interrupted by the appearance in the quadrangular slough without of a large figure in the uniform of the ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... at 2 o'clock, several miles ahead, on a hill, and I proposed to walk down there and let the boat go ahead of us. So Joseph and I got out and struck through a willow swamp along a dim path, and by and by came out on the steep bank of a slough or inlet or something, and we followed that bank forever and ever trying to get around the head of that slough. Finally I noticed a twig standing up in the water, and by George it had a distinct and even vigorous ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... surprised by MacTavish Mhor and his associates and followers, who usually inflicted an adequate penalty, either in person or property, or both. The creagh is yet remembered in which he swept one hundred and fifty cows from Monteith in one drove; and how he placed the laird of Ballybught naked in a slough, for having threatened to send for a party of the Highland ...
— Chronicles of the Canongate • Sir Walter Scott
... replenishing his purse. The Vicar of Wakefield had brought him little but reputation; the Good-natured Man had brought him L500. It was to the stage that he now looked for assistance out of the financial slough in which he was plunged. He was engaged in writing a comedy; and that comedy was She Stoops ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... well," muttered Harley, when the door had closed upon the parson. "The viper and the viper's brood! So it was this man's son that I led from the dire Slough of Despond; and the son unconsciously imitates the father's gratitude and honour—Ha, ha!" Suddenly the bitter laugh was arrested; a flash of almost celestial joy darted through the warring elements of storm ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... "hummocks," with their wild, redundant vegetation, their entanglement of trees, bushes, and vines, their scent of flowers and song of birds; or the broad sunshine of the savanna, where they waded to the neck in grass; or the deep swamp, where, out of the black and root-encumbered slough, rise the huge buttressed trunks of the Southern cypress, the gray Spanish moss drooping from every bough and twig, wrapping its victims like a drapery of tattered cobwebs, and slowly draining away their life, for even plants devour each other, ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... season of drought and scarcity ask not the distressed dervish, saying: "How are you?" Unless on the condition that you apply a balm to his wound, and supply him with the means of subsistence:—The ass which thou seest stuck in the slough with his rider, compassionate from thy heart, otherwise do not go near him. Now that thou went and asked him how he fell, like a sturdy fellow bind up thy loins, and take his ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... is the state of primeval perfection; whose heavenly it hath not entered into the heart of man to conceive. Then in that bright Millennium, whose radiance streams through the advancing ages, shall man cast off the slough of ignorance and sin, and rise like the painted butterfly, on the wings of faith, into the serene air ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... the party with shrill cries sprang to their feet; the low cart was filling with water. They had left the canon and were crossing a slough; no one had remembered that it would be high tide. The girls, without an instant's hesitation, whipped their gowns up round their necks; but their feet were wet and their skirts draggled. They made light of it, however, as they did of everything, and drove up to Miramar amidst ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... my recent misery was the ecstasy which succeeded my liberation. The happy sense of relief imparted to me such a feeling of buoyancy that I was enabled to extricate myself from this 'slough of despond,' and I soon reached the swift current, when a few strokes landed me in security ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... went to Beaconsfield to view a house, and had a fly from Slough, a drive of several miles. The house was in the middle of the town, large and convenient, with good garden and paddock; the whole was offered us for $200 yearly; and we should have taken it, had it not been in such a dismantled ...
— Our Farm of Four Acres and the Money we Made by it • Miss Coulton
... back for many miles from the heart of an ugly city to the cabbage gardens that gave the maker of the seal his opportunity to call the city "urbs in horto." Somewhere between the two—that is to say, forninst th' gas-house and beyant Healey's slough and not far from the polis station—lives Martin Dooley, ...
— Mr. Dooley in Peace and in War • Finley Peter Dunne
... be or be not, he also knows not. Now I wish to chuck him head first from thy bridge, so as to suddenly rouse (if possible) this droning dullard and to leave behind in the sticky slush his sluggish spirit, as a mule casts its iron shoe in the tenacious slough. ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... not escape being crossed. As, however, this does not occur, it appeared to me probable that the pollen {108} of each variety was prepotent on its own stigma over that of all other varieties. But Mr. C. Turner of Slough, well known for his success in the cultivation of this plant, informs me that it is the doubleness of the flowers which prevents the bees gaining access to the pollen and stigma; and he finds that it is difficult even to cross them artificially. Whether this explanation will ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... with the long, stout cane, plunged into the slough. He was more anxious than he was willing to say, but at the same time he was hopeful. As the swamp was due, at least in large part, to the great rains, it must have firm ground somewhere, and he had noticed also in the thickening twilight that the bushes ahead seemed much larger ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... art. The people of the armistice were weary and apprehensive—weary of the war, weary of politics, weary of the worn-out framework of existence, and filled with a vague, nameless apprehension of the unknown. They feared that in the chaotic slough into which they had fallen they had not yet touched bottom. None the less, with the exception of fervent Catholics and a number of earnest sectarians, there were few genuine ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... H. D. had the same effect. And it was not only in proximity that he could distribute energy, but from afar, by letter and cable. He had some intuitive way of knowing just when you were slipping into a slough of laziness and discouragement. And at such times he either appeared suddenly upon the scene, or there came a boy on a bicycle, with a yellow envelope and a book to sign, or the postman in his buggy, or the telephone rang and ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... Santa Fe, the rebels, numbering some sixteen hundred, set out for Fort Union. At Apache Pass, or Pigeon's Ranch, they were met by a Colorado regiment, with what regulars and militia could be found, all under command of Colonel John P. Slough (afterwards chief justice of the Territory), and were defeated, their wagons, ammunition, and all their stores having been destroyed by a party of Union troops under Captain W. H. Lewis, Fifth United States Infantry, ...
— Frontier service during the rebellion - or, A history of Company K, First Infantry, California Volunteers • George H. Pettis
... to have ready a Theme to send off to Harvard. Of course, every Thursday morning We, with one accord, begin to make excuses. Well, the Dread Day rolls around to-morrow, and consequently I am deep in the Slough of Despond. My only consolation is that our Geniuses can't write regularly, but then the mood to write never possesses me.... This week, in writing a comparison between Hamlet and Antonio, I did succeed in jotting down ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... for those in the bonds of sin and despair, as bound with them. Hence his power as a preacher; hence the wonderful adaptation of his great allegory to all the variety of spiritual conditions. Like Fearing, he had lain a month in the Slough of Despond, and had played, like him, the long melancholy bass of spiritual heaviness. With Feeble-mind, he had fallen into the hands of Slay-good, of the nature of Man-eaters: and had limped along his difficult way upon the crutches of Ready-to-halt. ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... the east, the paralleling bluffs lay at a distance, and broke their ridge-back far up the scarlet coulee; from where, southward, stretched a wide gap—ten broad and gently undulating miles—that ended at the slough-studded base of Medicine Mountain. Evan Lancaster, as he stood bareheaded under the unclouded sky, looked about him upon acres heavy with tangled grass and weeds; and pleased with the evident richness of the untouched ground, and with the sheltered ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... of Cronos that he should be deathless and live eternally; and Zeus bowed his head to her prayer and fulfilled her desire. Too simply was queenly Eos: she thought not in her heart to ask youth for him and to strip him of the slough of deadly age. So while he enjoyed the sweet flower of life he lived rapturously with golden-throned Eos, the early-born, by the streams of Ocean, at the ends of the earth; but when the first grey hairs began to ripple from his comely head and noble chin, queenly Eos kept away from his bed, though ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... looked upon him, half relenting; and at that he raised the stick that was in his hand and cruelly struck me on the face. "Lead on!" he cried again. "Must I be all day, catching my death in this vile slough, and all ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... had still a life-work to accomplish. He at one stroke freed himself from all distractions; his pupils and concerts, his whole connection at Bath, were immediately renounced; he accepted the King's offer with alacrity, and after one or two changes settled permanently at Slough, ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... as I shall think always, that we might have lived innocently and happily in New England, forgetting and forgotten by the rabble we left behind us, having shaken off the slough of an unhappy life, beginning the world again, under new names, in a new climate and country. It was a guilty dream to entertain, perhaps; but I shall dream it often enough in a strange land, among strange faces and strange ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... interruptions, which jarred the harmony of his artistic life, he nevertheless met courteously any that were to him inevitable. Could he have written with the heart's blood of old Hepzibah if he had failed to put his own shoulder to the domestic wheel, on the plea that it was too deep in the slough of disaster to command his assistance? He did not dread besmirching his hands with any affairs sent ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... glasses of mild champagne, one after the other, as quickly as I could, but it did not quench my thirst. I was feverish and would have given anything in the world for something to interest me suddenly and have absorbed me and lifted me out of that slough in which my heart and my brain were being engulfed, as if in a quicksand. I did not venture to avow to myself what was making me so dejected, what was torturing me and driving me mad with grief, or to scrutinize ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... continued, "that the man's days were spent amongst a class where the passions run loose, where restraint is an unknown virtue, where self and sensuality are the upraised gods. One can easily imagine that from amongst such a slough might spring at any time the weed of tragedy. In other words, this man Morris Barnes moved amongst a class of people to whom murder, if it could be safely accomplished, would be ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... arrival in London we became acquainted with the illustrious family of the Herschels, through the kindness of our friend Professor Wallace, for it was by his arrangement that we spent a day with Sir William and Lady Herschel, at Slough. Nothing could exceed the kindness of Sir William. He made us examine his celebrated telescopes, and explained their mechanism; and he showed us the manuscripts which recorded the numerous astronomical discoveries he had made. They were all arranged in the most perfect ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... interest that she was surprised when the meal was finished. Afterward, she and Mrs. Hastings talked with the housekeeper for a while, and an hour had slipped away when Wyllard suggested that he should show her the slough ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... WILLIAM (1792-1871).—S. of Sir William H., the eminent astronomer and discoverer of the planet Uranus, was b. at Slough, and ed. at Camb., where he was Senior Wrangler and first Smith's prizeman. He became one of the greatest of English astronomers. Among his writings are treatises on Sound and Light, and his Astronomy ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... and demands a delicacy of treatment which would have been thrown away upon the melodramatic subjects which Verdi had hitherto affected. Much of his music is really graceful and refined, but his efforts to avoid vulgarity occasionally land him in the slough of sentimentality. Nevertheless, the pathos which characterises some of the scenes has kept 'La Traviata' alive, though the opera is chiefly employed now as a means of allowing a popular prima donna to display her high notes and ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... trunk. A strange, wild strain, like a detached chord of a vesper melody, sounds above him! It is the whippoorwill—steadily, continuously, entrancingly the dulcet measure is taken up and echoed, until the slough of despond seems transformed into a varying diapason of melancholy minstrelsy. He dares not raise his head. It will vanish if he moves. He crouches, panting, almost exultant, in the sense of recovered faculties, or rather the suspension of numbing fear. ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... claims a share in it; the nature of trade requires it. It is an old Anglicism, 'Such a man drives a trade;' the allusion is to a carter, that with his voice, his hands, his whip, and his constant attendance, keeps the team always going, helps himself, lifts at the wheel in every slough, doubles his application upon every difficulty, and, in a word, to complete the simile, if he is not always with his horses, either the wagon is set in a hole, or the team stands still, or, which is worst of all, the load is ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe
... sank lower and lower in the slough. To please the Pope, havoc was made of the Leopoldine laws—named after the son of Maria Theresa, the wise Grand Duke Leopold I.—laws by which a bridle was put on the power and extension of the Church. ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... inevitably have suffered death at her hands had you even hinted at it) is beginning to enjoy herself intensely. Once again this luckless couple look to her for help. She is to be the one to raise them from their "Slough of Despond,"—difficult but congenial task! "Then you have been existing on lemon tart and one glass of sherry since breakfast time?" she says, with the deepest commiseration. "Poor darling! I saw it; I noticed you ate nothing except the tart. ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... recollect any particular crisis such as Thoreau describes, but I can trace the process in myself. I took no pains to cast the slough of cities; I registered no vows and consulted no teachers; it seemed that the thing was quietly done for me by the Higher Powers. I had no part in the matter except to be docile. Nature took me in hand, as sleep takes in hand the sick child; the only thing asked of me was my ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... Steele was at war with fortune. His hopefulness was inexhaustible, but he learnt no lessons from experience, and escaped from one slough to fall into another. He was as unthrifty as Goldsmith, whom in many respects he resembles, and his warm, impulsive nature was allied to a combativeness and jealousy which sometimes led him to quarrel ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... "is the famous Slough of Despond—a disgrace to all the neighborhood; and the greater that it might so easily be converted into ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... earnings, though she insisted that Schumann was assured of one thousand thalers a year, and she could earn an equal sum with one concert a winter in Dresden, where prices were so high. But just then the prosperity of Schumann's paper began to slough off. It occurred to the lovers that they would prefer to live in Vienna, and that the Zeitschrift could prosper there. There were endless difficulties, a censorship to pacify, and many commercial schemes to arrange, but nothing must be left untried. The scheme ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... just like exercising your muscles in a gymnasium. You can lift twice or three times as much after you've been in training a month as you could before. And I can see that it's going to be just so with your son. His going through college won't hurt him,—he'll soon slough all that off,—and his bringing up won't; don't be anxious about it. I noticed in the army that some of the fellows that had the most go-ahead were fellows that hadn't ever had much more to do than girls before the war broke out. Your son will ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... said at the time," said the old man drily; "and it has long been a commonplace that that slough awaits State Socialism in the end, if it gets to the end, which as you know it did not with us. However it went further than this minimum and maximum business, which by the by we can now see was necessary. The government now found it imperative ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... general sickness, chilliness and some fever. The skin over the sore part is hot and painful. The several dead parts may run together until the entire mass separates in a slough. In favorable cases it proceeds to heal kindly, but in severe cases it may spread to the surrounding tissues and end fatally, sometimes by the absorption of putrid materials, or by the resulting weakness. It runs usually from ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... me," he confided to his friend Bob Wilson one evening as during his transit through a particularly dismal slough of despond they in company were busily engaged in blazing the trail with empty bottles; "One such as I, a man of thirty and of good health, without a dollar or the prospect of a dollar, an income or the prospect of an income, ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... Jerry of the gipsies, but a much more showy-looking personage. Jerry was no longer a gentleman of "three outs"—the difficulty would now have been to say what he was "without." Snakelike he had cast his slough, and rejoiced in new and brilliant investiture. His were "speaking garments, speaking pockets too." His linen was of the finest, his hose of the smartest. Gay rings glittered on his fingers; a crystal ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... ought to wait, say a week at least having killed all your mules for you, before I shot down your dogs—but not being exactly Phoibos Apollon, you are to know further that when I did think I might go modestly on, ... [Greek: omoi], let me get out of this slough of a simile, never mind with what dislocation of ancles! Plainly, from waiting and turning my eyes away (not from you, but from you in your special capacity of being written-to, not spoken-to) when I turned again you had grown formidable somehow—though ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... matter, and show that we will deny ourselves that which has so insidiously worked the ruin of millions, that so we may perhaps win poor fallen creatures, fallen through drink, to come out of their miserable slough by crying to them, not merely 'Come out,' but 'Come ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... or spice, or after other copious secretions; as after drunkenness, cathartics, or fever fits, the mucus of the mouth becomes viscid, and in small quantity, from the increased absorption, adhering to the tongue like a white slough. In the diabaetes, where the thirst is very great, this slough adheres more pertinaciously, and becomes black or brown, being coloured after a few days by our aliment or drink. The inspissated mucus on the tongue of those, who sleep ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... the Divine Heritage, and whose mission it is to unfold qualities which are your inheritances from your Parent. Do not make the great mistake of confounding the Relative with the Absolute. Avoid this pitfall into which so many have fallen. Do not allow yourself to fall into the "Slough of Despond," and wallow in the mud of "nothingness," and to see no reality except in the person of some forceful teacher who takes the place of the Absolute in your mind. But raise your head and assert your Divine Parentage, and your Heritage from the Absolute, and step out boldly ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... bitten in as she regarded me. She seemed indeed like the very spirit of mischief, and, walking briskly in the room, had soon involved me in a kind of quarrel over nothing and (at the least) with nothing intended on my side. I was like Christian in the slough—the more I tried to clamber out upon the side, the deeper I became involved; until at last I heard her declare, with a great deal of passion, that she would take that answer at the hands of none, and I must down upon my ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... themselves, that he altogether abandoned the reins, and allowed himself to live such a life as is passed by some young men in London. His tastes and appetites were too high for this. He did not sink into a slough of despond. He did not become filthy and vicious, callous and bestial; but he departed very widely astray from those rules which governed him during his ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... off. The Greek philosopher declared that if he had a standing-place he could move the earth. Give to capital the ground of perpetuity of tenure, whereon to plant its machinery, and it will soon lift this island from the slough of despond. Then may it be said more truly than Grattan said it in 1782, that Ireland had got nearer ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... queer slough, too," replied Vautrin. "The mud splashes you as you drive through it in your carriage—you are a respectable person; you go afoot and are splashed—you are a scoundrel. You are so unlucky as to walk off with something or other belonging to somebody else, and they ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... own way;" but such a thought was soon kicked in disgrace from his noble and well-disciplined mind. He resolved, that, let it cost what it might in the shape of loss of time and trial of temper, he would leave no stone unturned, and spare no pains, to deliver his friend of yesterday from the slough into which he was plunging. How he might best work for this end occupied his thoughts ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... consequence of so many pretending to know. It is one of those facts which have become confounded by a variety of historians. Some asserted that she lost her way among the tangled mazes of the swamp, and sank into some pit or slough; others, more uncharitable, hinted that she had eloped with the household booty, and made off to some other province; while others surmised that the tempter had decoyed her into a dismal quagmire, on the top of ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... of the most characteristic of the artist's designs are to be found in his illustrations to the "Waverley Novels." In one of these he shows us the illustrious Dominie at the moment, when reaching over to gather a water-lily, he falls souse into the Slough of Lochend, in which he forthwith became bogged up to the middle, his plight drawing from him of course his favourite ejaculation of amazement. By the assistance of some women the luckless Dominie was extracted from his position, justifying the remark of one ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... mustache and guitar into ridicule; he seduced him into a hunt with the buckhounds (though Castleton himself had not hunted before since he was thirty), and drew him, spluttering German oaths, out of the slough of a ditch; he made him the laughter of the clubs; he put him fairly out of fashion,—and all with such suavity, and politeness, and bland sense of superiority, that it was the finest piece of high comedy you ever beheld. The poor prince, who had been ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... memories of the pilgrims and their fairs on the Way, he may have had other scenes in his mind which suggested other names. The Delectable Mountains may have been the blue line of the Sussex Downs, or the hills by Black Down and Hindhead. The Slough of Despond may have been the marshy pools of Shalford Common, or the ponds under the hill by Chilworth; and Doubting Castle, spelt Dowding Castle, is actually a name to be found on the Surrey map, south of Epsom Downs on Banstead Heath. ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... his guns shrieked its message of death across the island. The gunboats concentrated their fire on the main battery which was located on low ground, almost submerged by the high water and separated from the others by a wide slough. Their gun platforms were covered with water—the men in gray must work their pieces standing half-leg deep in mud and slush. Five iron-clad gunboats led the attack. Three of them were lashed together in midstream and one lay under the shelter ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... saw in my dream that just as they had come to an end of this talk, they drew near to a slough that was in the midst of the plain, and as they took no heed, they both fell in. The name of the slough was Despond. Here they lay for a time in the mud; and the load that Christian had on his back made him sink all the more in ...
— The Pilgrim's Progress in Words of One Syllable • Mary Godolphin
... much both for myself and for you—for I, too, am proud. Your daughter shall be such as she ought to be; shall do what she ought to do; shall suffer what she ought to suffer. To-morrow all will know from what a slough you have rescued me; in seeing the repentant at the foot of the cross, they will, perhaps, pardon the past in consideration of my present humility. It would not be so, my dear father, if they saw me, as a few months ago, shining in the midst of the splendors ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... learn to appreciate the liberty of law;—to know that license is the foe of freedom; and, though the sophistry of Passion in these books disgusted me, flowers of purest hue seemed to grow upon the dark and dirty ground. I thought she had cast aside the slough of her past life, and begun a new existence beneath the sun of ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... old Hobson. Death hath broke his girt, And here, alas! hath laid him in the dirt; Or else, the ways being foul, twenty to one He's here stuck in a slough, and overthrown. 'Twas such a shifter that, if truth were known, Death was half glad when he had got him down; For he had any time this ten years full Dodged with him betwixt Cambridge and The Bull. And surely Death could never have prevailed, Had not his weekly course of carriage ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... my slough," Captain Clive said, laughing, "and have, thank God, exchanged my pen ...
— With Clive in India - Or, The Beginnings of an Empire • G. A. Henty
... regions become well-known places, and moral qualities distinct human beings. Evangelist, who puts Christian on the way to the Wicked Gate; Pliable, who deserts him at the first difficulty; Help, who pulls him out of the Slough of Despond; Mr. Worldly Wiseman, who shows him an easy way to be rid of his burden, are all life-like individuals. Timorous, Talkative, Vain Confidence, Giant Despair, are not mere personifications, but distinct human beings with whom every reader of the "Pilgrim's Progress" feels ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... that the great numerical majority of the inhabitants bear this character, he spoke truly, inasmuch as the great numerical majority of the inhabitants are negroes, among the most depraved in the island. Kingston is like the slough of Despond, a place whither all the scum and filth of the negro population in the east end of the island do continually run, and make it a very sink of wickedness. But are the white families and the large number of thoroughly respectable colored families to be confounded with this mass of ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... nations of antiquity, which, left to themselves, never received from without any spiritual and religious instruction, could never rise from the slough of sensuality and superstition; they sank deep in idolatry, and ultimately adopted creeds and practices abominable and repugnant alike to the excellence of reason and the dignity of man. On the other hand, all the nations that totally or partly succeeded in extricating themselves from a ...
— A Guide for the Religious Instruction of Jewish Youth • Isaac Samuele Reggio
... I must now return to the weary chapter of European diplomacy, to trace the tortuous course of popes and princes, duping one another with false hopes; saying what they did not mean, and meaning what they did not say. It is a very Slough of Despond, through which we must plunge desperately as we may; and we can cheer ourselves in this dismal region only by the knowledge that, although we are now approaching the spot where the mire is deepest, the hard ground is ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... of Snipe was found situated in a slight depression at the base of a small hillock near the border of a prairie slough near Evanston, Illinois, and was made of grass stems and blades. The color of the eggs in this instance was a deep grayish white, three of which were marked with spots of dark brown, and the fourth egg with spots and ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [August, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... run ahead of my story. When we fell to playing, after breakfast, on the second day away from the caves, Lop-Ear led me a chase through the trees and down to the river. We came out upon it where a large slough entered from the blueberry swamp. The mouth of this slough was wide, while the slough itself was practically without a current. In the dead water, just inside its mouth, lay a tangled mass of tree trunks. Some of these, what of the wear and tear of freshets and of being stranded long ...
— Before Adam • Jack London
... existence, wandering farther and farther from the beauty and freshness and from the kindly gushing springs of clear gladness that made all around us green in our youth! One wanders and gropes in a slough of stock-jobbing, one sinks or rises in a storm of politics, and in either case it is as good to fall as to rise—to mount a bubble on the crest of the wave, as to sink a ...
— George Cruikshank • William Makepeace Thackeray
... east Clay began to slough the outward marks of his calling. He gave his spurs to Johnnie before he left the ranch. At Tucson he shed his chaps and left them in care of a friend at the Longhorn Corral. The six-gun with which he had shot rattlesnakes he packed into his suitcase at El Paso. His wide-rimmed ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... over the next few years. I continued to sink deeper and deeper into the slough. I knew all the drugstore clerks in New York by their first names, and they called me by mine. I no longer even had to specify the abomination I desired. I simply handed the man my ten cent check and said: "The ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... performed by rail. Instead of the slow, solitary, pensive pilgrimage which John Bunyan describes, we travel in fashionable company, and in the most agreeable manner. A certain Mr Smooth-it-away has eclipsed the triumphs of Brunel. He has thrown a viaduct over the Slough of Despond; he has tunnelled the hill Difficulty, and raised an admirable causeway across the valley of Humiliation. The wicket gate, so inconveniently narrow, has been converted into a commodious ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... for instance, to find that the luck of the thirteen began right back at the time when Jan, motoring back from Uzhitze down the valley of the Morava, coming fastish round a corner, plumped right up to the axle in a slough of clinging wet sandy mud. The car almost shrugged its shoulders as it settled down, and would have said, if cars could speak, "Well, what are you going to do about that, eh?" It was about the 264th mud hole in which Jan's motor had stuck, and ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... some delay at Santa Fe, the rebels, numbering some sixteen hundred, set out for Fort Union. At Apache Pass, or Pigeon's Ranch, they were met by a Colorado regiment, with what regulars and militia could be found, all under command of Colonel John P. Slough (afterwards chief justice of the Territory), and were defeated, their wagons, ammunition, and all their stores having been destroyed by a party of Union troops under Captain W. H. Lewis, Fifth United States Infantry, and Captain A. B. Cary, ...
— Frontier service during the rebellion - or, A history of Company K, First Infantry, California Volunteers • George H. Pettis
... ask why the Jews have not fled a hundred leagues from this Slough of Despond. The answer is, because they were born there. Moreover, the taxation is light, and rent is moderate. Add that, when famine has been in the land, or the inundations of the Tiber have spread ruin and devastation around, ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... day John Cardigan and his men could not cut more than twenty thousand feet of lumber. Nevertheless, when Cardigan looked at his mill, his great heart would swell with pride. Built on tidewater and at the mouth of a large slough in the waters of which he stored the logs his woods-crew cut and peeled for the bull- whackers to haul with ox-teams down a mile-long skid-road, vessels could come to Cardigan's mill dock to load and lie safely in twenty feet of water at low tide. ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... batrachian is of the genus bufo, he is by no means a buffo genius. He may be styled the solemn organist of the swamp; slough music being his specialty. Like other out-door performers on wind instruments, he is chiefly heard in pleasant weather, and during the summer his organ is without stops. Being a Democrat, he appreciates the dignity of labor, and consequently ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 8, May 21, 1870 • Various
... written, when the unexpected early return of my servant with your packet (your's and he meeting at Slough, and exchanging letters) obliged me to leave off to give its contents a reading.—Here, ...
— Clarissa, Or The History Of A Young Lady, Volume 8 • Samuel Richardson
... Grenoble, whether on horseback or afoot, was obliged to follow a track high up on the mountain side, for the valley was quite impassable. The pretty road between this place and the first village that you reach as you come into the canton (the way along which you must have come) was nothing but a slough at all seasons ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... was certainly happy to her heart's core. Could it be that she had some hope, unrecognized by herself, that Owen Fitzgerald might now once more be welcomed at Desmond Court? that something might now be done to rescue him from that slough ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... 10 grains to the ounce of water; sugar of lead or sulphate of zinc, 20 grains to an ounce of water; and so on. Or advertised gall cures may be applied. If a sitfest has developed, the dead hornlike slough must be cut out and the wound treated with antiseptics. There is no way we know of to make hair come in with natural color after a wound. The swelling on the colt's leg may he reduced by rubbing it well several times a day ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... conquer, but the vanquished never submits. The higher nature may be compelled to grovel, to wallow in the mire of sensual indulgence, but it always rebels and enters its protest. It can never forget that it bears the image of its Maker, even when dragged through the slough of sensualism. The still small voice which bids man look up is never quite hushed. If the victim of the lower nature could only forget that he was born to look upward, if he could only erase the image of his Maker, if he could only hush the voice which haunts him and condemns him when ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... wheat, was the first crop which the Partridge brothers put in. The total yield was seven bushels, obtained from around the edges of a slough! ...
— Deep Furrows • Hopkins Moorhouse
... sang in Evan's heart. Rose and her mother were of one stamp. And Rose might speak for her mother. To take the hands of such a pair and be lifted out of the slough, he thought no shame: and all through the hours of the morning the image of two angels stooping to touch a leper, pressed on his brain like a reality, and ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... oil lamp, and if beneath that gleam appears the horrid face of a withered old woman with fleshless fingers, ah, then! and we say it in the interests of young and pretty women, that woman is lost. She is at the mercy of the first man of her acquaintance who sees her in that Parisian slough. There is more than one street in Paris where such a meeting may lead to a frightful drama, a bloody drama of death and love, a drama of ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... 2. A meeting is advertised for to-morrow, to take place at Apsley House. Then to proceed to Slough or Salt Hill, or to Eton, to deliver there a petition to the Duke of Cumberland, who is then to present it to the King, and the people are ...
— A Political Diary 1828-1830, Volume II • Edward Law (Lord Ellenborough)
... sublimity of conception which renders the poet, and the man of great literary and original endowments "in apprehension like a God," we could not have, if we were not privileged occasionally to cast away the slough and exuviae of the body from incumbering and dishonouring us, even as Ulysses passed over his threshold, stripped of the rags that had obscured him, while Minerva enlarged his frame, and gave loftiness to ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... old person of Slough, Who danced at the end of a bough; But they said, "If you sneeze, you might damage the trees, You ...
— Nonsense Books • Edward Lear
... battles of spurs and other encounters. Sudden riches beget insolence, tumults, civic broils. Internecine quarrels, horrible tumults stain the streets with blood, but education lifts the citizens more and more out of the original slough. They learn to tremble as little at priestcraft as at swordcraft, having acquired something of each. Gold in the end, unsanctioned by right divine, weighs up the other forces, supernatural as they are. ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... to utter any of those pious commonplaces by which she might have attempted to bring him to a better frame of mind. She had tact enough to divine that he was best left to himself—left to struggle out of this grovelling state by some effort of his own, rather than to be dragged from the slough of despond by ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... lived along the Barrens all his life. David described a typical case of sniffles, with running at eyes and nose, and Bouvais laughed. "The only cold we have up here is when the lungs get touched by frost," he said, "and then you die—the following spring. Always then. The lungs slough away." And then he asked: ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... all day and almost every day; tents were water-logged and one moved about in a slough of sticky mud. We ate mud, we drank it in our tea, we slept in it, for our wardrobes had been left behind in Cairo. Harness-cleaning was another bugbear, but even that succumbed to the mud after a time; and as the weeks flew by and inspections, infallible finger-posts to a "scrap," became ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... know anything at all about you it is that you are not the sort of character to make such a horrible mess of your life as that poor wretch has done. But now, the question is: What can I do to help you and your respected mother out of this slough into which another man's weakness and sin have plunged you both? Not very much, I am afraid; for I cannot restore to you the property of which you are robbed. That appears to be gone beyond recall. But I can do this for you—and it may possibly help you a little—I can give you a ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... reflect with a true filial resemblance the beauteous countenance of British liberty, are we to turn to them the shameful parts of our constitution? are we to give them our weakness for their strength, our opprobrium for their glory, and the slough of slavery, which we are not able to work off, to ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... disappointment and exasperation. But this is not the aspect of the scene which grips and moves us. Our attention is centred on Thaddeus's struggle to take his wife's misdeed upon himself; and his failure cannot be described as a peripety, seeing that it sinks him only one degree lower in the slough of despair. Like the scene in Mrs. Dane's Defence, this is practically a piece of judicial drama—a hard-fought cross-examination. But as there is no reversal of fortune for the character in whom we are chiefly interested, it scarcely ranks as ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... fat gentleman found much to interest them as the coach rolled over the smooth prairie road, now and then crossing a slough. Not that Mr. Minorkey or his fat friend had any particular interest in the beautiful outline of the grassy knolls, the gracefulness of the water-willows that grew along the river edge, and whose paler green was the prominent feature of the landscape, ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... that all I saw was from a curtained auto as we swayed and bumped over broken roads, with an occasional interlude when Jeremy and I got out to lend our shoulders and help the Arab driver heave the car out of a slough. ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... breath of air was in motion except such as was stirred by the wings of the grasshoppers or was blown from the hot nostrils of the harassed cattle. They passed through the cornfield, over a stubblefield beyond, through a slough, another stubblefield, and on to the open prairie of another section of "Railroad land." The boy and girl made no further attempt to guide them. A cow, with the tickling feet of half a dozen of these devils of torment on the end of a bare, wet nose, was in no state ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... occasion; he is ready for a row when his blood is well up; and he will take to his book, if you will give him a schoolmaster. What is he, indeed, but the rough block of English character? Hew him out of the quarry of ignorance; dig him out of the slough of everlasting labor; chisel him, and polish him; and he will come out whatever you please. What is the stuff of which your armies have been chiefly made, but this English peasant? Who won your Cressys, your ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... let light into it, to make a road clear through it, that shall not be immediately choked up by the ooze of the morass and the luxuriant parasitical growth of the forest—who dare hope for that? At present, alas, it would seem as though no one dares even to hope! It is the great Slough of Despond of ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... the poor fellow with many a hopeful message from the gospel of mercy and soon drew him out of the Slough of Despond; but he drew him out with so eager an arm that up went this impressionable personage from despond to the fifth heaven. He was penitent, forgiven, justified, sanctified, all in three weeks. Moreover, he now fell ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... A Sunny Bank diploma was a sure passport. When the girls worked they worked hard, and when playtime came it was enjoyed to the full. Naturally, with so many dispositions surrounding her, Miss Preston often in secret floundered in a "slough of despond," for that which could influence one girl for her good might prove a complete failure when brought to bear upon another. Never was the old adage, "What is one man's meat is another man's ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... poor soul," said the reeve, "else he will hardly get across that slough. He has fallen, ...
— A King's Comrade - A Story of Old Hereford • Charles Whistler
... saw in my dream that just as they ended their talk, they drew nigh to a bog that was in the midst of the plain, and they being heedless did both fall suddenly into it. The name of this bog was the Slough of Despond. Here therefore they struggled for a time, being grievously covered with dirt. And Christian, because of the burden that was on his back, began to sink in the mire. Then said Pliable, "Ah, Neighbor Christian, where ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... many a ginger-nut and decorative bonbon. And from her, too, he had set forth, with tears, in his new Eton jacket and broad white collar, to go to Mr. Chapman's preparatory school for little boys at Slough. Here he remained for several years, acquiring a respect for the poet Gray and a love of Slough peppermint that could only cease with life. Here too he made friends with Robert Green, son of Lord Churchmore, who was afterwards ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... and innocent girl, but of her body and soul as well! And it is me, me whom you ask to be a party to this shameful transaction. Her dead father left her to my care, and I am to sell her to you, that her money may redeem our name from the slough into which you have flung it? Is innocence to be sacrificed that vice may ride abroad again? Look here," says the professor, his face deadly white, "you have come to the wrong man. I shall warn Miss Wynter against ...
— A Little Rebel - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... forth he darts into the dry, Rolls eyes of fire and rages through the fields, Furious from thirst and by the drought dismayed. Me list not then beneath the open heaven To snatch soft slumber, nor on forest-ridge Lie stretched along the grass, when, slipped his slough, To glittering youth transformed he winds his spires, And eggs or younglings leaving in his lair, Towers sunward, lightening with three-forked tongue. Of sickness, too, the causes and the signs I'll teach thee. Loathly scab ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... on a cart, but the rude carts used on the estate could not very well carry it, and a sledge was substituted. Several times, during the journey through the forest, the sledge had to be halted while the underwood was cut away to permit of its passing; and once a slough had to be filled up with branches hewn from fir trees, and bundles of fern. These delays made it evening before the shore of the creek ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... regain their old position. If they had always been poor and commonplace, they would not be so likely to presume. What you say about the girl's not caring for you is sheer nonsense. She'd marry you to-morrow if she could. The one idea of such people is to get out of the slough into which they have fallen, and they'll marry out of it the first chance they get, and like enough they'll do worse if they can't marry. I tell you they are the most dangerous kind of people, and Southern at that. I've learned all about them; the father has gone to the devil for good and all, ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... about to plunge, for a chapter or two, into as complete a labyrinth as ever historian was perplexed withal; therefore, I advise them to take fast hold of my skirts, and keep close at my heels, venturing neither to the right hand nor to the left, lest they get bemired in a slough of unintelligible learning, or have their brains knocked out by some of those hard Greek names which will be flying about in all directions. But should any of them be too indolent or chicken-hearted to accompany ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... said so much as "Thank you." She put the shawl round her mistress, and then went slowly back. She sat down on the stone steps, and glared stupidly at the scene, and felt very miserable and leaden. She seemed to be stuck in a sort of slough of despond, and could not move in any direction to ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... had been a great treat. Larry kept the two drumsticks as well as the wings of the gobbler. Possibly he might many a time feel a queer little sensation creeping up and down his spinal column as memory carried him back again to that slough, where the treacherous black mud was slowly but surely ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... Mississippi and South Carolina. How, then, came it to pass that nearly the whole of the population of the South became Rebels in so short a time? Because they were under the dominion of their leading men, who took them from the right road, and conducted them into the slough of rebellion. Because they were encouraged so to act by the Northern Democracy as made rebellion inevitable. The Northern Democratic press and Northern Democratic orators held such language respecting "Southern ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... had licked Fay. She fled blindfold from it, not knowing whither, only away from that pain, over any precipice, into any slough. ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... going on like this for thirty years or more; yet if there's roast pork on the table, and I say a word to put him off it, he's that hurt as never was. Why, I'm only too glad to see him enjoying his food if no harm comes of it; but it's dreary work seeing your husband in the Slough of Despond, especially when it's your business to drag him out again, and most especially when you particularly ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... sure she is no meaner than a fay, Redeem'd from sleepy death, for beauty's sake, By old ordainment:—silent as she lay, Touched by a moonlight wand I saw her wake, And cut her leafy slough, and so forsake The verdant prison of her lily peers, That slept amidst the stars upon the lake— A breathing shape—restored to human fears, And new-born love and grief—self-conscious of ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... moment, in a wretched slough of helplessness, Dorothy found her conviction wavering. Could it really be possible that he was speaking the truth; that he did not know? But with the dreadful thought came also the realization that she must not let him fathom her mind. She told herself ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... again, those fierce beasts of prey, represented by their own acts in life, never cause any anxiety to them that are of little intelligence. If any person, O monarch, somehow escapes from diseases, Decrepitude, that destroyer of beauty, overwhelms him afterwards. Plunged in a slough by the objects of the different senses—sound and form and taste and touch and scent—man remains there without anything to rescue him thence. Meanwhile, the years, the seasons, the months, the fortnights, the days, and the nights, coming one after another, gradually despoil him of beauty and ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... three months, his zeal had not abated, and while Danvers lay stretched on the bank of the wide slough, O'Dwyer could be seen, not far distant, sunning himself like a contented dog at ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... be "careful and not captious," as you suggest, but more than all, I shall try not to run myself or my cause into the slough of political schemes or schemers. And I pray you, be prudent and conscientious, and do not surrender one iota of true principle or of our philosophy of reform ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... scar, Deep marked upon his royal brow; To paint him thus would greatly mar The monarch's beauty; as a slough Would mar the beauty of a lawn, Where queenly feet are wont to tread; Or like the cloud at early dawn, Which hides some glory ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them ...
— Nature • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... endorse my plan, was openly discouraging. To him the town was a pestilential slough in which he, at any rate, was inextricably mired, and though he was not quite so definite with me, he said to others, "Garland's ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... further, it is highly dramatic and picturesque. It is, to be sure, an allegory, but one of those allegories which seem inherent in the human mind and hence more natural than the most direct narrative. For all men life is indeed a journey, and the Slough of Despond, Doubting Castle, Vanity Fair, and the Valley of Humiliation are places where in one sense or another every human soul has often struggled and suffered; so that every reader goes hand in hand with Christian and his friends, fears for them in their dangers and rejoices in their escapes. ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... say a word about Slough, which is still the favourite cry of Lord Inverforth's critics, who have held their peace about the "dumps" since the publication of the White Paper describing the ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... sorry tale; For whether it be wine, or it be ale, That he hath drank, he speaketh through the nose, And sneezeth much, and he hath got the POSE, {19} And also hath given us business enow To keep him on his horse, out of the slough; He'll fall again, if he be driven to speak, And then, where are we, for a second week? Why, lifting up his heavy drunken corse! Tell on thy tale, and look we to his horse. Yet, Manciple, in faith thou art too nice Thus openly to chafe him for his vice. Perchance ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... to the depths in which John B. Gough found himself at the age of twenty-five years. By sheer force of will he raised himself from the slough in which he wallowed, till he attained a position honored among men, and performed a service of exceptional usefulness ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... curious to observe, how the appearance of characters will change, whilst the root that produces them remains the same. The Washington faction having waded through the slough of negociation, and whilst it amused France with professions of friendship contrived to injure her, immediately throws off the hypocrite, and assumes the swaggering air of a bravado. The party papers of that imbecile administration were ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... here, Mrs. Trapes! In fact, Arthur broke into my—er—life just when things were at their darkest generally. Arthur found me very depressed and gloomy. Arthur taught me that life might yet have its uses. Arthur lifted me out of the Slough of Despond. Arthur brought me—to you! And behold! life is good and perchance shall be even better if—ah yes, if! So you see, my dear Mrs. Trapes, Arthur has done much for me, consequently I have much to thank Arthur for. Indeed, I ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... 8.2, dipping to the south-east.) A clayey soil mixed with spangles of mica covered the rock, to the depth of three feet. Travellers suffer from the dust in winter, while in the rainy season the place is changed into a slough. On descending the table-land of Buenavista, about fifty toises to the south-east, an abundant spring, gushing from the gneiss, forms several cascades surrounded with thick vegetation. The path leading to the spring is so steep ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... called "Slough dogs," in consequence of their exploring the sloughs, mosses, and bogs, in pursuit of offenders, called Moss-troopers. They were used for this purpose as late as the reign of James the First. In Scotland they are called the Sleuth-hound. ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... walk. scald, a poet. mall, a mallet. sew'er (so'er), one who sews. slough (sluf), a snake's skin. sew'er (su'er), a drain. slough, a miry place. court'e sy, civility. wear, a dam in a river. courte'sy, a slight bow. wear, waste. slav'er, a slave ship. min'ute (min'it), sixty seconds. slav'er, spittle. mi nute', very ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... ready to fight the devil himself in a good cause. Upon his friends R. H. D. had the same effect. And it was not only in proximity that he could distribute energy, but from afar, by letter and cable. He had some intuitive way of knowing just when you were slipping into a slough of laziness and discouragement. And at such times he either appeared suddenly upon the scene, or there came a boy on a bicycle, with a yellow envelope and a book to sign, or the postman in his buggy, or the telephone rang and from the receiver ...
— Appreciations of Richard Harding Davis • Various
... with abolition, regulation (suddenly, involuntarily, the recent words of the reporter came to his mind), Magdalene asylums and all these distributions of holy books in the establishments! Here, I'll up and act as a really honest man, snatch a girl out of this slough, implant her in real firm soil, calm her, encourage ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... becomes crabbed, morose, and querulous, losing all pleasure in life. He wants the passport to enjoyment and respect—money; he has only his debts, and these make him suspected, despised, and snubbed. He lives in the slough of despond. He feels degraded in others' eyes as well as in his own. He must submit to impertinent demands, which he can only put off by sham excuses. He has ceased to be his own master, and has lost the independent bearing of a man. He seeks to excite pity, and pleads for time. ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... the eddies, its limbs feebly quivering; a fish arises, and it is gone. Lower down the stream, I can see over a knoll the green and damp turf roofs of four or five hovels, built at the edge of a morass, which is trodden by the cattle into a black Slough of Despond at their doors, and traversed by a few ill-set stepping stones, with here and there a flat slab on the tops, where they have sunk out of sight;—and at the turn of the brook I see a man fishing, with a boy and a dog—a picturesque and pretty group enough certainly, if they had not ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... meadow with a bridle in my hand, mounted the blood mare,—she was the fleetest in the field by half,—and away to the doctor. We went like the wind. I took a short cut for better speed, but it was a hobbly road. Just as I came in sight of the doctor's house there was a slough that had been mended with stones and fagots and anything that came to hand. I pushed her over, but her foot caught in a hole amongst the sticks, and—crack! it was over in ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... think so, but the whole country, far and wide around, entertained precisely the same opinion. It is not, therefore, surprising that two young men like Frank and Vernon should be well pleased with their quarters, or that, having so early gotten into the slough of love, they should daily continue to sink deeper into the mire. The young poet's lame leg, though not a very serious affair, was still sufficient to keep him for several days a close prisoner to the house; but if any one had asked him—no, we don't go so far as to say that, for ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... the ill-boding wings of a screech owl,[36] together with its flesh; and the entrails of an ambiguous wolf, that was wont to change its appearance of a wild beast into {that of} a man. Nor is there wanting there the thin scaly slough of the Cinyphian water-snake,[37] and the liver of the long-lived stag;[38] to which, besides, she adds the bill and head of a crow that had sustained {an existence of} nine ages. When, with these ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... warriors outside Kimberley—who were much alive! The figures were afterwards reduced to four, and eventually to two. But these important amendments were not proposed and carried for weeks after the events to which they related, by which time we were so deep in the slough of despond over something else that we could not sink deeper. We were still in the dark as to the progress of the campaign. No accurate accounts of the disasters, mishaps, and reverses that marked its opening stages ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... a sliver in the door bore the entry in lead- pencil, "Gone Duck Shooting to Plover Slough," for it was the custom of the twins to faithfully chronicle the cause of their absence and their probable location each time they left home, to make it easy to find them in the event of a cablegram from Aunt ...
— The Black Creek Stopping-House • Nellie McClung
... everything beautiful in his time," murmured Grande, partly because, gazing at the distant prospect, she thought so, and partly as a praiseworthy attempt, in her turn, to pluck us out of the slough into ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... thyself to be led away by pleasures; shun, like the plague, the foolish familiarities thou seest between some men and women; harmless enough at first, but which by insidious degrees corrupt the heart, and thence lead it to negligence, and then into the vile slough of vice. Credit me, the greatest safeguard to female chastity is sobriety of demeanour. I beseech and direct that thou often call to mind the friendship which was betwixt us; but I do not wish thee to mourn for me too much—an injunction which, so far as it is in my power, I lay on all ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... equal. Their productive capability is the marvel even of this age of industrial miracles. And yet, with every nerve strained to its utmost tension; toiling, saving—at very death-grips with destiny—they are sinking year by year deeper into the Slough of Despond—into that most frightful of all Gehennas, ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... decides that he himself is the man appointed by God and promised by the Prophets to perform these works. Good Heavens! in what an entirely dark and sordid stupor is our Christopher now sunk—a veritable slough and quag of stupor out of which, if he does not manage to flounder himself, no human hand ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... the city he found it situated in a slough. It was generally supposed that the ground upon which the city was built was a natural swamp, and when Palmer, among others, advocated the idea of raising the streets they were ridiculed. But subsequent tests proved that beneath the surface there was a solid rock bottom, therefore it ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... crabbed, morose, and querulous, losing all pleasure in life. He wants the passport to enjoyment and respect—money; he has only his debts, and these make him suspected, despised, and snubbed. He lives in the slough of despond. He feels degraded in others' eyes as well as in his own. He must submit to impertinent demands, which he can only put off by sham excuses. He has ceased to be his own master, and has lost ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... Thursday morning, Sept. 21, just two weeks after the robbery, Oscar saw us, and fled into town with the alarm. A party of forty was soon out in search for us, headed by Capt. W. W. Murphy, Col. Vought and Sheriff Glispin. They came up with us as we were fording a small slough, and unable to ford it with their horses, they were delayed somewhat by having to go around it. But they soon after got close enough so that one of them broke my walking stick with a shot. We were in sight of our ...
— The Story of Cole Younger, by Himself • Cole Younger
... is a distinct plant from the Self Heal, or Sanicle, and belongs to the labiate order of herbs. It grows commonly in waste places about England, and bears pink flowers, being sometimes called Slough heal. This is incorrect, as the surgical term "slough" was not used until long after the Prunella and the Sanicle became named Self-heal. Each of these was applied as a vulnerary, not to sloughing sores, ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... individual and social lives of the most contented and healthy sort. Would such men and women, liberated from our endless, unceasing struggle against mass prejudice and inertia, be deprived in any way of the stimulating zest of life? Would they sink into a slough ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... Crowland monks, for twenty marks of silver, to drain as much as he could of the common marshes; and then shut out the Welland by strong dykes, built cottages, marked out gardens, and tilled fields, till 'out of slough and bogs accursed, he ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... Alida's room to help her sort and address them. "You certainly have your share this year," she said, laughing. "Do you remember what a slough of despond you were ...
— Cicely and Other Stories • Annie Fellows Johnston
... their composure; in order to appreciate the humour of the sally it was necessary to know that Miss Vincent had "come a cropper" at the last meet of the Long Island Hunt Club, and been extricated from a slough several ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... parental authority might have restrained the passions he had seen burning in the prisoner's eyes when the desperate man spoke the words which had seemed to doom his father to death. The sheriff felt that he might have saved this fiery spirit from the slough of slavery; that he might have sent him to the free North, and given him there, or in some other land, an opportunity to turn to usefulness and honorable pursuits the talents that had run to crime, perhaps to madness; he might, still less, have given this son of his ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... also, sunk in her own terrors, it was almost unbearable. The pure unspoilt passion of it—the careless, confident joy—seemed to make an outcast of her, as she sat there in the dark, dragged back by the shock and horror of Delane's appearance into the slime and slough of old memories, and struggling with them in vain. Yes, she was "damaged goods"—she was unfit to marry George Ellesborough. But she would marry him! She set her teeth—clinging to him with all the energy of a woman's deepening and ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... pardon, reverend father, and my good lord," replied that pink of courtesy; "I did but wait to cast my riding slough, and to transmew myself into some civil form meeter ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... Stoke lies the village of Slough, rendered famous by the residence of the celebrated astronomer, Sir William Herschel, and a short way further, on a gentle slope continued the whole way from Stoke, stand the venerable towers of time-honored Eton, on the bank of the Thames, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... protested that we were to believe in God, not in a theory about God, though the distinction, as Mr. Stephen says, is vague; he appealed to the inner light, to the conscience of mankind; he went back into the slough of Intuitionism. Carlyle cried aloud against materialistic views and logical machinery; he denounced 'the great steam-engine, Utilitarianism'; he was for the able despot and hero-worship against grinding competition and ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... "touched with the feeling of their infirmities." He could feel for those in the bonds of sin and despair, as bound with them. Hence his power as a preacher; hence the wonderful adaptation of his great allegory to all the variety of spiritual conditions. Like Fearing, he had lain a month in the Slough of Despond, and had played, like him, the long melancholy bass of spiritual heaviness. With Feeble-mind, he had fallen into the hands of Slay-good, of the nature of Man-eaters: and had limped along his difficult way upon ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... cannot go so fast as I would, by reason of this burden that is on my back. Now I saw in my dream, that, just as they had ended this talk, they drew near to a very miry slough that was in the midst of the plain; and they, being heedless, did both fall suddenly into the bog. The name of the slough was De spond.[13] Here, therefore, they wallowed for a time, being grievously bedaubed with the dirt; and Christian, because of the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... closely to himself because the pain whipped him. She was wondering how to explain a little accident to the Melancolia. At any rate, if this man really desired the solace of her company—and certainly he would relapse into his original slough if she withdrew it—he would not be more than just a ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... home industry have always referred with satisfaction to the effect of the tariff of 1842 as an explicit and undeniable proof of the value of protection. It raised the country from a slough of despond to happiness, cheerfulness, confidence. It imparted to all sections a degree of prosperity which they had not known since the repeal of the tariff of 1828. The most suggestive proof of its strength and popularity was found in the contest ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... the plague, the foolish familiarities thou seest between some men and women; harmless enough at first, but which by insidious degrees corrupt the heart, and thence lead it to negligence, and then into the vile slough of vice. Credit me, the greatest safeguard to female chastity is sobriety of demeanour. I beseech and direct that thou often call to mind the friendship which was betwixt us; but I do not wish thee to mourn for me too much—an injunction which, so far as it is ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... bit of a smile continually bitten in as she regarded me. She seemed indeed like the very spirit of mischief, and, walking briskly in the room, had soon involved me in a kind of quarrel over nothing and (at the least) with nothing intended on my side. I was like Christian in the slough—the more I tried to clamber out upon the side, the deeper I became involved; until at last I heard her declare, with a great deal of passion, that she would take that answer at the hands of none, and I must down ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the other day, who, two years ago, was running a small paper at Larrabie's Slough. He was then in his meridian as a journalist, and his paper was frequently quoted by such widely-read publications as the Knight of Labor at Work, a humorous semi-monthly journal. He boldly assailed the silver dollar, ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... one as the many dull would meanly scorn and the few wise nobly envy. For him love comes like a mighty wind of fire and burns his heart clean. He may have been stained and spotted in the slough of life, but when the woman comes she ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... a little map in my pocket-book of the various twists and turns of the road through that vast Slough of Despond, marking them from hour to hour as we followed its devious wanderings. On studying this at the end of that part of our journey I realised afresh how utterly impossible it would have been for us to thread that misty maze where a few false steps would always have meant ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... Quagmire and quicksand, stagnant pool and sluggish stream, succeed in weary iteration. Bleached skeletons of dead trees writhe in weird contortions against the dark background of jungle, as though some wizard's curse had blighted life and growth amid the rank vegetation rising from this dismal Slough of Despond. The brooding melancholy of atmosphere and scenery penetrates mind and soul, oppressed by an intangible weight, and escape from the Dantesque horrors of this selva oscura is accompanied by a sudden relief and buoyancy of spirit which perceptibly heightens the interest of ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... until they are strong enough to protect themselves, feeding in the mean time upon fish and flesh of every description. In the water they move with agility, but on land their long bodies and short legs prevent rapid motion. They migrate during droughts from one slough or bayou to another, crossing the intervening upland. When discovered on these journeys by man, the alligator feigns death, or at least appears to be in an unconscious state; but if an antagonist approach within reach of that terrible tail, a blow, a ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... of summer; the oak leaves expand, the roses blow, butterflies are about, and I have spirits enough to write to you. We have had clouded skies this fortnight past, and roads like the Slough of Despond. Last Wednesday we were benighted on a dismal plain, apparently boundless. The moon cast a sickly gleam, and now and then a blue meteor glided along the ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... trassantes cum ipso, ad sequendum latrones.—Regiam Majestatem, Lib. 4tus, Cap. 32. And, so late as 1616, there was an order from the king's commissioners of the northern counties, that a certain number of slough-hounds should be maintained in every district of Cumberland, bordering upon Scotland. They were of great value, being sometimes sold for a hundred crowns. Exposition of Bleau's Atlas, voce Nithsdale. The breed of this sagacious animal, which could trace the human footstep with the most unerring ...
— Minstrelsy of the Scottish border (3rd ed) (1 of 3) • Walter Scott
... philosophy, they had perceived, at least, that it is harder far for one corrupted from her very childhood, corrupted by the very parents who should have guided, with all her highest qualities of mind and body perverted studiously till they had hardened into vices, to raise herself erect at once from the slough of sensuality and sin, and spring aloft, as the butterfly transmuted from the grub, into the purity and loveliness of virtue—than for one, who hath known no trial, suffered no temptation, to hold the ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... lost in the darkness. Radically, 'to founder' is to go to the bottom (Fr. fondrer; Lat. fundus, the bottom), hence applied to ships; it is also applied to horses sinking in a slough. The compound is Miltonic (see Par. Lost, i. 204), and is sometimes stigmatised as meaningless; on the contrary, it is very expressive, implying that the brothers are swallowed up in night and have lost their way. 'Founder' is here used in the secondary sense of 'to be lost' ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... dog seized me again, and I again roughly forced him from me. At this juncture my attention was directed to several hatchet-marks on the deck, and I instantly inquired the meaning. The answer was, 'The snake, sir! the snake is loose!' And so it proved. The reptile had cast his slough, and assumed with renewed beauty all its natural energy. It had forced itself out of the cage, and after doing some damage below, found its way to the deck, spreading consternation among the men; by whom, as it appeared, it had been slightly wounded, hatchets having been used ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... a fool's paradise of luxury and riot, never looking down but to squeeze from them an extra drop of honey— like sheep-boys stuffing themselves with blackberries while the sheep are licking up flukes in every ditch? And now you wish to leave the poor man in the slough, whither your neglect and your example have betrayed him, and made his too apt scholarship the excuse for your own remorseless greed! As a Christian, I am ashamed of you all; as a Churchman, doubly ashamed of those prelates, hired ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... such a thought was soon kicked in disgrace from his noble and well-disciplined mind. He resolved, that, let it cost what it might in the shape of loss of time and trial of temper, he would leave no stone unturned, and spare no pains, to deliver his friend of yesterday from the slough into which he was plunging. How he might best work for this end occupied his thoughts as he ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... any of those pious commonplaces by which she might have attempted to bring him to a better frame of mind. She had tact enough to divine that he was best left to himself—left to struggle out of this grovelling state by some effort of his own, rather than to be dragged from the slough of despond by moral ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... understand Old England and never will," the reverse being equally the fact. "The Millennium must come," says Darwin (ii. 387), "before nations love each other:" I add that first Homo alalus seu Pithecanthropus must become Homo Sapiens and cast off his moral slough—egoism and ignorance. Mr. Cleveland, in order to efface the foul stigma of being the "English President," found it necessary to adopt the strongest measures in the matter of "Fisheries;" and the "Irish vote" must quadrennially be bought ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... not to be altered. Josephine was forced to leave her daughter and to return to Paris. Her husband wrote to her from Warsaw: "I have your letter of January 15. It is impossible for me to let women undertake such a journey: bad roads, unsafe, and a slough of mud. Go back to Paris; be happy and contented there; perhaps I shall be there soon. I laugh at what you say, that you married to be with your husband. I had thought in my ignorance that the wife was created for the husband, the husband for the country, the family, and glory. Forgive my ignorance. ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... rude carts used on the estate could not very well carry it, and a sledge was substituted. Several times, during the journey through the forest, the sledge had to be halted while the underwood was cut away to permit of its passing; and once a slough had to be filled up with branches hewn from fir trees, and bundles of fern. These delays made it evening before the shore of the ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... time," said the old man drily; "and it has long been a commonplace that that slough awaits State Socialism in the end, if it gets to the end, which as you know it did not with us. However it went further than this minimum and maximum business, which by the by we can now see was necessary. The government now found it imperative ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... him and by the constant holding of foreign models before his eyes, and he was not a man of genius; yet his verse kept to a loftier ideal than had appeared for a long time and his effort to lift Castilian poetry from the slough of convention into which it had fallen was successful. During the rest of the century the impulse given by Boscan divided Spanish lyrists into two opposing hosts, the Italianates and those who clung to the native meters (stanzas of ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... settled it decidedly that marriage and love are superfluities, intended only for the rich, who live at ease, and have no need to take thought for the morrow; or desperations—the last and reckless joy of the deeply wretched, who never hope to rise out of the slough of ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... conduct of story Martin Chuzzlewit is defective, character and description constituting the chief part of its strength. But what it lost as a story by the American episode it gained in the other direction; young Martin, by happy use of a bitter experience, casting off his slough of selfishness in the poisonous swamp of Eden. Dickens often confessed, however, the difficulty it had been to him to have to deal with this gap in the main course of his narrative; and I will give an instance from a letter he wrote to me when engaged upon the number in which Jonas brings ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... no impure love. I repeat: There is no impure love. The impurity is in the mortal mind of man, obstructing his vision until he fails to see the purity of that which fain would lift him from the Slough of Despond to ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... He used to be driven about in a cart, and one legend says that he often preached to the woodmen in the wild forests that lay to the north of London. On a certain day one of the cart-wheels came off in a slough. The worthy confessor was in a dilemma. The congregation under the oaks might have waited for ever, but the one wheel left was equal to the occasion, for it suddenly grew invested with special powers of balancing, and went on as steadily ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... Slough, where he was introduced to Herschel. In this case there was something like real community of tastes, for the astronomer was musical, having once played the oboe, and later on acted as organist, first at Halifax Parish Church, and then at the Octagon Chapel Bath. The big telescope with which ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... grape-vines,—where the air is sweet with woodland odors, and vocal with the song of birds. Then the deep cypress-swamp, where dark trunks rise like the columns of some vast sepulchre. Above, the impervious canopy of leaves; beneath, a black and root-encumbered slough. Perpetual moisture trickles down the clammy bark, while trunk and limb, distorted with strange shapes of vegetable disease, wear in the gloom a semblance grotesque and startling. Lifeless forms lean propped in wild disorder against ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... that Rush Creek bridge within a week after it was built, and wondered who it could be that had the nerve to undertake that task. Rush isn't over half as wide a bayou as Boggy, but she's a true little sister to this miry slough. So he's going to build a bridge ...
— The Log of a Cowboy - A Narrative of the Old Trail Days • Andy Adams
... his carelessness (but then he had been so worn out with watching), his fatal mistake, his heartless mistake (and yet he would almost have given his own life for his children) had brought him down to this slough of despond. There was no hope, the doctors never told him of any, and he knew he could not ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... judged by present-day standards, for in a fourteen-hour working day John Cardigan and his men could not cut more than twenty thousand feet of lumber. Nevertheless, when Cardigan looked at his mill, his great heart would swell with pride. Built on tidewater and at the mouth of a large slough in the waters of which he stored the logs his woods-crew cut and peeled for the bull- whackers to haul with ox-teams down a mile-long skid-road, vessels could come to Cardigan's mill dock to load and ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... a fine, clear morning when we started for Windsor by railroad, a distance of twenty-one miles. The country is fine; but our thoughts were on the castle. At Slough we took an omnibus, and rode into the town. It is a pretty, quiet place, of about ten thousand inhabitants. There are some six or seven streets, and they present but few attractions. The castle is every thing. You know this has been the favorite residence of most of ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... position and the first shell from his guns shrieked its message of death across the island. The gunboats concentrated their fire on the main battery which was located on low ground, almost submerged by the high water and separated from the others by a wide slough. Their gun platforms were covered with water—the men in gray must work their pieces standing half-leg deep in mud and slush. Five iron-clad gunboats led the attack. Three of them were lashed together in midstream and one ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... she is no meaner than a fay, Redeem'd from sleepy death, for beauty's sake, By old ordainment:—silent as she lay, Touched by a moonlight wand I saw her wake, And cut her leafy slough, and so forsake The verdant prison of her lily peers, That slept amidst the stars upon the lake— A breathing shape—restored to human fears, And new-born love and ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... machine-guns and packs of straw, loomed up out of the darkness as we passed, until the last of the column was reached and the frieze of ghostly figures was swallowed up into the night. We drew a long breath, for we knew now from the colonel of the battalion whose men had delivered us from that Slough of Despond that we had been within 150 yards of the German lines. We had mistaken Richebourg l'Avoue for Richebourg ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... d'Antin must have the credit of filling it wisely with the painter Jean-Baptiste Oudry. He was a man endowed with the sort of energy we are apt to consider modern and American. He already occupied a high place in the Gobelins, and retained it, too, while he lifted Beauvais from the Slough of Despond, and carried it ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... reveries at times, though sorely jarred, now and then, by events that took our philosophy aback. For after all, philosophy—that is, the best wisdom that has ever in any way been revealed to our man-of-war world—is but a slough and a mire, with a few tufts of good ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... moss-traversing spunkies Decoy the wight that late and drunk is; The bleezin', curst, mischievous monkeys Delude his eyes, Till in some miry slough he sunk is, Ne'er mair ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... step forward. She look'd up to God. On the sudden a new strength entered into her. She was up to the Neck in Water five times that very Day in passing Rivers. At night she fell over head and ears, into a Slough in a Swamp, and hardly got out alive.... She is come home alive ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... denunciations; and he predicted that the Narodnaya Volya, which had organised the various acts of terrorism culminating in the assassination of the Emperor, would never develop into a powerful revolutionary party. It had sunk into the slough of untruth, and it could only continue to deceive ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... bad," because once an individual feels he is responsible to himself for undue physical indulgences—for laws of natural life set at naught, and spiritual impulses disregarded—he will try to emerge from the slough of evil, and he will learn with startling rapidity to value all joys of the senses less and less. There can be no high order of morality without this sense of responsibility, for when a man feels he is moulding his own ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... five minutes before Hugh could extract himself from the slough of speculation into which those thoughtless words had driven him. What did Veath know about her ideas on such matters? Where did he learn so much? The other spoke to him twice and received no answer. Finally he shook ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon
... a share in it; the nature of trade requires it. It is an old Anglicism, 'Such a man drives a trade;' the allusion is to a carter, that with his voice, his hands, his whip, and his constant attendance, keeps the team always going, helps himself, lifts at the wheel in every slough, doubles his application upon every difficulty, and, in a word, to complete the simile, if he is not always with his horses, either the wagon is set in a hole, or the team stands still, or, which is worst of all, the load is spoiled ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe
... would not do, we were under the necessity of knocking some over, when the rest soon jumped off. However, F—- and myself declared we would go right into the quadrangle of the Castle, so we went into the middle of the road and formed a line. Soon a rocket (the signal that the Queen was at Slough) was let off, and then some Life Guards came galloping along, and one of them ran almost over me, and actually trod on F—-'s toe, which put him into dreadful pain for some time. Then came the Queen's ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... strollers, who were now in their element, played their parts with so much craft and delicacy, and with such an infinity of humour besides, that everything he overheard plunged him deeper in the slough. They knew something of local affairs, and called one another Mayor very naturally; and mentioning their wives, let drop other scraps of information that, catching his ear, made the wretched man every now and then sit up as if a wasp had stung him. ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... propositions are distinctly materialistic: nay, that whoever commits himself to them will be temporarily landed in 'gross materialism.' Not the less, however, does he, mingling consolation with admonition, recommend us to plunge boldly into the materialistic slough, promising to point out a way of escape from it, and insisting, indeed, that through it lies the only path to genuine ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... consummate its desire. Yet in spite of that he felt upon him the strange unrest of a greater adventure than the quest for Black Roger. It was like an impending thing that could not be seen, urging him, rousing his faculties from the slough into which they had fallen because of his wound and sickness. It was, after all, the most vital of all things, a matter of his own life. Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain had tried to kill him deliberately, with malice and intent. That she had saved him afterward only added ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... came to a place where, in order to cut off a long sweeping curve of the river with open water and bad shore ice, we went through a dry slough and had to drag those iron runners over gravel and stones, where sometimes it was all the three of us could do to move the sled a few feet at a time. Yet all along the banks were willows, and if we had only known then what we know now we would have cut down and ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... sentence was read, it was objected to by the audience. Mr. —— objected to the word slough, as an ill sounding, disagreeable word, and which conveyed at first to the eye the idea of a wet boggy place; such as the slough of Despond. At last S——, who had been pondering over the affair in silence, exclaimed, "But I think there's another fault in the allusion; do not snakes cast ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... pulled the lever back and the steam goes up with less force through the chimney: working quietly. Away, away, on our iron steed through Ealing and Hanwell—across the viaduct over the River Brent, which runs to Brentford—past the pretty church and the dull lunatic asylum, and so on to Slough, which is passed in twenty-three minutes after quitting Paddington. Then we reach Taplow, and have just fifty-five miles to do within the hour. "Crimea" rushes across the Thames below Maidenhead, with a parting roar, but we shall meet the river again ...
— Little Folks (July 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... now thinking of another method of replenishing his purse. The Vicar of Wakefield had brought him little but reputation; the Good-natured Man had brought him L500. It was to the stage that he now looked for assistance out of the financial slough in which he was plunged. He was engaged in writing a comedy; and that comedy was She ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... came about that Vassilissa Beggoe, half pouting defiance, half eager, began to pull herself out of the slough into which her race had slipped. There were difficulties perpetually arising—Ishmael had to be snubbed for sneering at her abysmal ignorance; and a course more adapted to her needs and temperament than the classic one the Parson was unfolding before the ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... was beginning to come on, we came to an almost impassable slough in the trail, where a small stream descended into a little flat marsh and morass. This had been used as a camping-place by others, and we decided to camp, because to travel, even in the twilight, was dangerous to ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... when I first undertook to deliver the present discourse, it appeared to me to be a fitting opportunity to explain how such a union is not only consistent with, but necessitated by, sound logic. I purposed to lead you through the territory of vital phaenomena to the materialistic slough in which you find yourselves now plunged, and then to point out to you the sole path by which, in my judgment, extrication ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... territory half is slough, Half pine-tree forest: maples, scarlet oaks Breed o'er the river-beds; even Mincio chokes With sand the summer through: but 'tis morass In winter up to Mantua's walls. There was, Some thirty years before this evening's coil, One spot reclaimed from the surrounding spoil, Goito; just a ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... exactly what treatment to use to cover all cases. It cannot be taught by correspondence, and, simple though it sounds to hear it, it cannot be learned by attendance at a few clinics. It is delicate in this sense, that if it is not rightly performed in the individual case the glands will slough. That means loss of time, loss of temper, and the waste of a perfectly good pair of young goat-glands. Another very important thing which his experiments have taught Dr. Brinkley is this: the glands on being removed from the goat must immediately be placed in a salt solution warmed ...
— The Goat-gland Transplantation • Sydney B. Flower
... nothing. He was tired, and absorbed in his new possessions. It was good to sit down in his study, and spread his treasures out on the broad table, and gloat over them. A clump of damp moss rested quietly on his new sermon, "The Slough of Despond," but he took no note. He was looking for a place to put this curious little lizard in, and after anxious thought selected the gilt celluloid box, lined with pink satin, which the Mission Circle had given him on Christmas for his collars and cuffs. ...
— "Some Say" - Neighbours in Cyrus • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... treated with the utmost rigour of the law? WINSER, the cabman, who gave his false evidence so gaily in the Thirkettle Case, has been had up, and sentenced. Having dealt with WINSER, it is only a short step from WINSER to SLOUGH—but perhaps such a slough of muck, that it wants the pluck of a Hercules in the Augaean stable to commence operations, and a deus ex-machina—that is, the Public Prosecutor from the Treasury—to see that the proceedings are not ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, January 25th, 1890 • Various
... how, in the eternal contest between the sexes, she had not only laid all her cards upon the table, but had permitted him to win every trick. She fell from the summit of her blissful anticipations into a slough of despair. She had little or no hope of his ever making her the only possible reparation. Ruin, disgrace, stared her in the face. And after all the fine hopes with which she had embarked on life! Her pride revolted at this promise of hapless degradation. Anything ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... I watched the first few puffs, awaiting a repartee. None came. I felt a qualm of apprehension. Was he already becoming de-Paragot-ised? I did not realise then what it means to a man to cast aside the slough of many years' decay, and take his stand clean before the world. He shivers, is liable to catch cold, like the tramp whose protective hide of filth is summarily removed in the workhouse bath. Nor did my dear lady realise this. How could she, bright freed creature, hungering ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... you call it—of being arrant asses," retorted the doctor, "and not having sense enough to know honest air from poison, and the dry land from a vile, pestiferous slough. I think it most probable—though, of course, it's only an opinion—that you'll all have the deuce to pay before you get that malaria out of your systems. Camp in a bog, would you?—Silver, I'm surprised at you. You're less a fool than many, take ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to slough off even their children, in an adolescent impatience with any barrier to an immediate desire. So contrary is this to nature that regret follows closely their decision. The children, however, are laden with a burden put on them by their parents. ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... quivered. The old influence was fast coming back. Already in his mind he was picturing himself telling Charlie all and with his help extricating himself from the slough into which he had sunk. How could he stand unmoved with that voice, familiar by many a memory of simple courageous goodness, again falling on his ear; and that appealing face, one so loved and delighted in, again ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... got into this slough? When was it that I came down from the Mount where I had seen the Lord, and came back to make these miserable, petty things as much my business as ever? Oh, these fluctuations in my religious life amaze me! I cannot, doubt that I am really God's child; ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... of Warwick—the Cromwell of his day—dethroned him more than once; but he had the hearts of the merry dames of London, and the purses and veins of the cockneys bled freely, till they brought him home again. How say you?—shall I shake off my northern slough, and speak with Alice in my own character, showing what education and manners have done for me, to make the best amends they can ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... the first place, take this for your motto at the commencement of your journey, that the difference of going just right, or a little wrong, will be the difference of finding yourself in good quarters, or in a miserable bog or slough, at the end of it. Of the whole number educated in the Groton stores for some years before and after myself, no one else, to my knowledge, escaped the bog or slough; and my escape I trace to the simple fact of my having put a restraint upon my appetite. ...
— Bay State Monthly, Volume I, No. 2, February, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... friends R. H. D. had the same effect. And it was not only in proximity that he could distribute energy, but from afar, by letter and cable. He had some intuitive way of knowing just when you were slipping into a slough of laziness and discouragement. And at such times he either appeared suddenly upon the scene, or there came a boy on a bicycle, with a yellow envelope and a book to sign, or the postman in his buggy, or the ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... on like this for thirty years or more; yet if there's roast pork on the table, and I say a word to put him off it, he's that hurt as never was. Why, I'm only too glad to see him enjoying his food if no harm comes of it; but it's dreary work seeing your husband in the Slough of Despond, especially when it's your business to drag him out again, and most especially when you particularly ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... hardly put anything but dry bread before my poor children for their dinner." These children were two sons, whose education their mother entirely undertook, until, after old Madame Reyer's death in 1837, she succeeded to an inheritance, which lifted the little family out of the slough of poverty, and enabled her to provide ...
— The Story of Ida Pfeiffer - and Her Travels in Many Lands • Anonymous
... country, far and wide around, entertained precisely the same opinion. It is not, therefore, surprising that two young men like Frank and Vernon should be well pleased with their quarters, or that, having so early gotten into the slough of love, they should daily continue to sink deeper into the mire. The young poet's lame leg, though not a very serious affair, was still sufficient to keep him for several days a close prisoner to the house; but ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... waiting for Tautuk and Amuk Toolik at the edge of a slough where willows grew deep and green and the crested billows of sedge-cotton stood knee-high. The faces of the herdsmen were sweating. Thereafter Alan walked with them, until in that hour when the sun had sunk to its lowest plane they came to the ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... anxiety on the score of money. They had but one child, a son, afterwards Sir John Herschel, almost as great an astronomer as his father had been before him. In 1785, the family moved to Clay Hall, in Old Windsor, and in 1786 to Slough, where Herschel lived for the remainder of his long life. How completely his whole soul was bound up in his work is shown in the curious fact recorded for us by Carolina Herschel. The last night at Clay Hall was spent in sweeping the sky with the ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... opinion of others, is compelled to assume the appearance of being comfortably circumstanced in order to inspire confidence. Character is the life-blood of Englishmen, but character alone will seldom extricate a man from the slough of Poverty. In our highly artificial state of society, something more powerful than character alone is required to place a man in the road to fortune — call it as ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... beautiful in his time," murmured Grande, partly because, gazing at the distant prospect, she thought so, and partly as a praiseworthy attempt, in her turn, to pluck us out of the slough into which ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... extends down the thorax. Through this cross-shaped opening, the Anthrax suddenly appears, all moist with the humors of life's laboratory. She steadies herself upon her trembling legs, dries her wings and takes to flight, leaving at the window of the cell her nymphal slough, which keeps intact for a very long period. The sand-colored fly has five or six weeks before her, wherein to explore the clay nests amid the thyme and to take her small share of the joys of life. In July, we shall see her once more, ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... now they were carried along even more resolutely, by the stern, unwavering spirit of their new leader. Having once learned the direction, Stone put himself at the head of the party, and strode forward, almost "as the bird flies," directly toward the point indicated, regardless of slough, and swamp, and thicket. He moved rapidly, too—so rapidly, indeed, as to tax the powers of some of his followers almost too severely. Notwithstanding this swiftness, however, they could not avoid a long delay at the river; and it was consequently near ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... abandoned to die, in the swamps, by his timid companions, He prayed to the Virgin on high, and she led him forth from the forest; For angels she sent him as men —in the forms of the tawny Dakotas, And they led his feet from the fen, —from the slough of despond and the desert. Half-dead in a dismal morass, as they followed the red-deer they found him, In the midst of the mire and the grass, and mumbling "Te Deum laudamus." "Unktmee [72]—Ho!" muttered the braves, for they deemed him the black Spider-Spirit That dwells in the drearisome ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... few stones showing when the forms are removed. When stiff pastes or mortars are used the contractor often places the facing by plastering the lagging just ahead of the concreting; this process requires constant watching to see that the plaster coat does not slough or peel off before it is backed up ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... the two drumsticks as well as the wings of the gobbler. Possibly he might many a time feel a queer little sensation creeping up and down his spinal column as memory carried him back again to that slough, where the treacherous black mud was slowly but surely sucking ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... of this Slough of Despond, and having become convinced of God's love she told the good story to the sick in hospitals, to soldiers and sailors without number, and has done more for the good of Jack Tar afloat and ashore than perhaps any other ...
— Beneath the Banner • F. J. Cross
... make it interesting there would be a better attendance. It is all nonsense to spend one's whole time in getting up dainty dishes, and recherche toilets for one's babies. At all events we must arouse ourselves from this slough of indifference and give our best energies to the work. We have not made half a trial yet. How can we expect success to follow ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... the part of seafaring men to cultivate a self-respect, and elevate themselves in the scale of society; a line of conduct which is calculated to thrust them contemptuously back, and plunge them deeper in the slough from which, perhaps, they ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... alike; with some the flesh has begun to wither and to slough off, yet they are comparatively cheerful; as fatalists, it makes very little difference to them how soon or in what fashion they are translated to the other life. There is one youth who doubtless suffers some inconveniences from the clumsy development ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... was sinking in a slough Of sloth, and ease, and selfish greed; God surely sent this scourge ...
— 'All's Well!' • John Oxenham
... of drought and scarcity ask not the distressed dervish, saying: "How are you?" Unless on the condition that you apply a balm to his wound, and supply him with the means of subsistence:—The ass which thou seest stuck in the slough with his rider, compassionate from thy heart, otherwise do not go near him. Now that thou went and asked him how he fell, like a sturdy fellow bind up thy loins, and take his ass ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 2, Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... "I come from the Slough Trading Company as a matter of fact," said the young man, running through his gears from first to top like a pianist playing a scale. "Hope you don't mind a bit of noise. She talks some when ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... Book,[5] to a position on the north of London, thus gradually severing its communications with the rest of England, so that neither men nor convoys of provisions could enter its walls. Placing camps at Slough, Edmonton, and Tottenham, William himself remained some distance to the rear of these last with the main body of the army, and it seems probable that the actual surrender of London took place at or near Little Berkhampstead, in Hertfordshire,[6] ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... their feet only enough space for the whitewashed frame buildings of Fort Brannon. But to the east, the paralleling bluffs lay at a distance, and broke their ridge-back far up the scarlet coulee; from where, southward, stretched a wide gap—ten broad and gently undulating miles—that ended at the slough-studded base of Medicine Mountain. Evan Lancaster, as he stood bareheaded under the unclouded sky, looked about him upon acres heavy with tangled grass and weeds; and pleased with the evident richness of the untouched ground, and with the sheltered ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... astonishment, that it contained a printed pamphlet. We were all curious to see what sort of a pamphlet such a person would read; what it could contain that he seemed to have had such a care about. For the slough in which it was rolled was fine chamois leather; what colour it had been could not be known. But the pamphlet was wrapped so close together, and so damp, rotten, and yellow that it seemed one solid piece. We all concluded from ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... of primeval perfection; whose heavenly it hath not entered into the heart of man to conceive. Then in that bright Millennium, whose radiance streams through the advancing ages, shall man cast off the slough of ignorance and sin, and rise like the painted butterfly, on the wings of faith, into the serene air ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... young men drift away out of his acquaintance. He wanted especially to be with them in public places, and to see for himself, if possible, whether Cuckoo's accusation against Valentine were true. That a frightful change had taken place in Julian's life, and that he was rapidly sinking in a slough of wholly inordinate dissipation was clear enough. But did Valentine, this new, strange Valentine, lead him, or merely go with him, or stand aloof smiling at him and letting him take his own way like a foolish boy? That question the ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... with a world of friends more real and enjoyable than the actual folk we know, but also with a world for those friends to live in, more real and far more enjoyable than the world in which we ourselves sojourn. And this is well seen of Christian. The Slough of Despond and the terrible overhanging hill; the gateway and the Interpreter's House and the House Beautiful; the ups and downs of the road, and the arbours and the giants' dens: Beulah and the Delectable Mountains:—one knows them as one knows the country that one has walked over, and ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... poor, young or old, ugly or handsome, the girl is right; she has sense and judgment, she has tripped you over into the slough of self-interest and lets you know it," cried Honor. "She deserves an answer, a sincere and loyal and frank answer, and, above all, the honest expression of your thought. Examine yourself! sound your heart and purge it of its meannesses. ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... itself is of a superior order; he has undoubtedly both talents and acquirements beyond the ordinary run of every-day preachers. These alone, however, we hold, would not account for a twentieth part of the effect he has produced: they would have lifted him perhaps out of the mire and slough of sordid obscurity, but would never have launched him into the ocean-stream of popularity, in which he "lies floating many a rood;"—but to these he adds uncommon height, a graceful figure and action, ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... she stood up and shook the white wrappings from her, and came forth shining and splendid like some glittering snake when she has cast her slough; ay, and fixed her wonderful eyes upon me—more deadly than any Basilisk's—and pierced me through and through with their beauty, and sent her light laugh ringing through the air ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... but, beyond his yearly contribution of one dollar, he did nothing else but cavil and deplore. He inveighed against the low standards of the masses, and went on his way sadly, making all the money he could at his private calling, and keeping his hands clean from the slime of the political slough. He was a censor and a gentleman; a well-set-up, agreeable, quick-witted fellow, whom his men companions liked, whom women termed interesting. He was apt to impress the latter as earnest and at the same time fascinating—an alluring ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... carry through even the reforms thus far enumerated, it would make us feel as if we had been lifted from a slough and placed on a plateau abounding in air and sunlight; but if we stopped with this, we should leave much to be desired. There are still more pressing measures to ...
— Social Justice Without Socialism • John Bates Clark
... workers, and three or four little negro children asleep under the wagon. The workers were occupied at a little distance, in replacing boxes, beds, and some household trumpery, which had been taken out of the wagon, to enable them to effect its release from the slough in which it had cast one of its wheels, and broken its axle, and the restoration of which had made their supper so late in the night. The heavier difficulties of their labor had been got over, and with limbs ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... travelled warily, with their feet dragging to save themselves from falling. Everything was splashed with filth and corruption; one marvelled at the cleanness of the sky. Trees were blasted, and seemed to be sinking out of sight in this war-created Slough of Despond. We came to the brow of a hill; in the valley was something that I recognised. The last time I had seen it was in an etching in a shop window in Newark, New Jersey. It was a town, from the midst of whose battered ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... to be altered. Josephine was forced to leave her daughter and to return to Paris. Her husband wrote to her from Warsaw: "I have your letter of January 15. It is impossible for me to let women undertake such a journey: bad roads, unsafe, and a slough of mud. Go back to Paris; be happy and contented there; perhaps I shall be there soon. I laugh at what you say, that you married to be with your husband. I had thought in my ignorance that the wife was created for ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... he considered, the best possible thing for Rickman. His work on the review would give him the discipline he most needed, the discipline he had never had. To be brought into line with an august tradition; to be caught up out of the slough of modern journalism into a rarer atmosphere; to breathe the eternal spirit of great literature (a spirit which according to Jewdwine did not blow altogether where it listed); to have his too exuberant individuality ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... the policy as well as justice of a line of conduct which represses every effort on the part of seafaring men to cultivate a self-respect, and elevate themselves in the scale of society; a line of conduct which is calculated to thrust them contemptuously back, and plunge them deeper in the slough from which, perhaps, ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... was strong and full. When the damp air blew chilly over the cold, glittering expanse, and came to the faces of those who looked seaward like another tide; when a steel-like glint marked the low hollows and the sinuous line of slough; when the great shell-incrusted trunks of fallen trees arose again, and went forth on their dreary, purposeless wanderings, drifting hither and thither, but getting no farther toward any goal at the falling tide or the day's decline than the cursed Hebrew in ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... whites of 2 eggs; a solution of nitrate of silver, 10 grains to the ounce of water; sugar of lead or sulphate of zinc, 20 grains to an ounce of water; and so on. Or advertised gall cures may be applied. If a sitfest has developed, the dead hornlike slough must be cut out and the wound treated with antiseptics. There is no way we know of to make hair come in with natural color after a wound. The swelling on the colt's leg may he reduced by rubbing it well several times a day and at night rub in some 10 per ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson
... stand here all day! I move we get a hike on down to the boat. Maybe we can hitch on behind Steve Porter's launch—he's going up past Dead Tree Point—and that'll save us the long pull through the slough." ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Air on Lost Island • Gordon Stuart
... a great treat. Larry kept the two drumsticks as well as the wings of the gobbler. Possibly he might many a time feel a queer little sensation creeping up and down his spinal column as memory carried him back again to that slough, where the treacherous black mud was slowly but surely ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... religion, and to lend a hand in the writing of a few playlets. Becoming convinced of the irresponsible mendacity of the dramatic profession, I gave up the stage, too, vowing never to write except on commission, and sank entirely into the slough of journalism (glad enough to get there), inter alia editing a comic paper (not Grimaldi, but Ariel) with a heavy heart. At last the long apathy wore off, and I resolved to cultivate literature again in my scraps of time. It is a mere accident that I wrote ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... this Slough of Despond, and having become convinced of God's love she told the good story to the sick in hospitals, to soldiers and sailors without number, and has done more for the good of Jack Tar afloat and ashore than perhaps any other ...
— Beneath the Banner • F. J. Cross
... settlement in America, and for colonists he would have all these down-trodden and oppressed. He would gather, if he might, only those who when helped would help themselves—who when given opportunity would rise out of old slough and briar. He was personally open to the appeal of still another class of unfortunate men. He had seen upon the Continent the distress of the poor and humble Protestants in Catholic countries. Folk of this kind—from France, from Germany—had ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston
... success, and in height of humor in a still higher ratio. And in the course of the next Two Years rises to a great height indeed. Here—snatched, who knows with what difficulty, from that shoreless bottomless slough of an Austrian-Succession War, deservedly forgotten, and avoided by extant mankind—are some of the more essential phenomena, which Friedrich had to witness in those months. To witness, to scan with such intense interest,—rightly, at his peril;—and ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Mr. Smooth-it-away, "is the famous Slough of Despond—a disgrace to all the neighborhood; and the greater that it might so easily be converted into ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the many dull would meanly scorn and the few wise nobly envy. For him love comes like a mighty wind of fire and burns his heart clean. He may have been stained and spotted in the slough of life, but when the woman comes ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... well-disciplined mind. He resolved, that, let it cost what it might in the shape of loss of time and trial of temper, he would leave no stone unturned, and spare no pains, to deliver his friend of yesterday from the slough into which he was plunging. How he might best work for this end occupied his thoughts as he ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... The fact is, Goldsmith was now thinking of another method of replenishing his purse. The Vicar of Wakefield had brought him little but reputation; the Good-natured Man had brought him L500. It was to the stage that he now looked for assistance out of the financial slough in which he was plunged. He was engaged in writing a comedy; and that comedy was ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... Rachel, also, sunk in her own terrors, it was almost unbearable. The pure unspoilt passion of it—the careless, confident joy—seemed to make an outcast of her, as she sat there in the dark, dragged back by the shock and horror of Delane's appearance into the slime and slough of old memories, and struggling with them in vain. Yes, she was "damaged goods"—she was unfit to marry George Ellesborough. But she would marry him! She set her teeth—clinging to him with all the energy of a woman's deepening and maturing ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Holmes over his paper, watching the languid breath that showed how deep the hurt had been, the maimed body, the face outwardly cool, watchful, reticent as before. He fancied the slough of disappointment into which God had crushed the soul of this man: would he struggle out? Would he take Miss Herne as the first step in his stairway, or be content to be flung down in vigorous manhood to the depth of impotent poverty? He could not tell if ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... and the duke lost more. His mind was jaded. He floundered—he made desperate efforts, but plunged deeper in the slough. Feeling that, to regain his ground, each card must tell, he acted on each as if it must win, and the consequences of this insanity (for a gamester at such a crisis is really insane) were, that ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... then down to Napel[TR: Possibly Kapel] Slough on Dr. West's place. I wanted to rent but Dr. West wouldn't advance me anything unless he took a mortgage on my place; so I wouldn't stay there. I chartered a car and took my things back to Brinkley ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... his artistic life, he nevertheless met courteously any that were to him inevitable. Could he have written with the heart's blood of old Hepzibah if he had failed to put his own shoulder to the domestic wheel, on the plea that it was too deep in the slough of disaster to command his assistance? He did not dread besmirching his hands with any affairs ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... Yazoo; so that the works erected across the neck were said to be between the Tallahatchie and Yazoo, though the stream is one. The fort, which was called Pemberton, was built of cotton and earth; in front of it was a deep slough, and on its right flank the river was barricaded by a raft and the hull of the ocean steamer Star of the West, which, after drawing the first shots fired in the war, when the batteries in Charleston stopped her from reinforcing Fort ...
— The Gulf and Inland Waters - The Navy in the Civil War. Volume 3. • A. T. Mahan
... learnt it more betterer? BUMBLE could hopen the heyes of them BOOTHSES, JOHN BURNSES, ancetterer. Snow? Is it me brings the snow, and the hice, and the peasoupy slushiness, Making the subbubs one slough? No! The Age is give over to gushiness. Parties as writes to the Papers is snivellers, yus, every one of 'em, Barring the few as cracks jokes, though I own as I can't see the fun of 'em. Look at "UCALEGON," now, him as writes to a cheap ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 10, 1891 • Various
... and mistake than to a want of skill or fidelity in my instructors. And thus for a time I was occupied by exploded systems, mingling, like an unadept, a thousand contradictory theories and floundering desperately in a very slough of multifarious knowledge, guided by an ardent imagination and childish reasoning, till an accident again changed the current of my ideas. When I was about fifteen years old we had retired to our ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... into which you have ventured for the love of the country, form a sad quagmire. They are like John Bunyan's Slough of Despond, into which, as he observes, millions of cart-loads of good resolutions have been thrown, without perceptibly mending the way. From what you say, and from what I have heard from others, there is a very natural desire to trust to one or two empirical ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... designs are to be found in his illustrations to the "Waverley Novels." In one of these he shows us the illustrious Dominie at the moment, when reaching over to gather a water-lily, he falls souse into the Slough of Lochend, in which he forthwith became bogged up to the middle, his plight drawing from him of course his favourite ejaculation of amazement. By the assistance of some women the luckless Dominie was extracted from his position, justifying the remark of one ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... subtlety of idea, fortuitousness of opportunity, made it possible for some people to right their matrimonial and social infelicities; whereas for others, because of dullness of wit, thickness of comprehension, poverty, and lack of charm, there was no escape from the slough of their despond. They were compelled by some devilish accident of birth or lack of force or resourcefulness to stew in their own juice of wretchedness, or to shuffle off this mortal coil—which under other circumstances had such glittering possibilities—via the rope, the knife, the ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... more distinct, her attention was attracted by the white sail of a small boat lazily threading the sinuous channel of the slough. It might be Poindexter arriving by the more direct route from the steamboat that occasionally laid off the ancient embarcadero of the Los Cuervos Rancho. But even while watching it her quick ear caught the sound of galloping hoofs behind her. ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... for he had clung to the old arguments as long as possible, and refrained from forcing events. If substantial independence of Parliament and the Ministry could be secured, he was willing to allow the King a vague or imaginary headship until in the course of years that excrescence should slough away. ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... And he trots off in the darkness. After waiting about two hours I hear the tramp of horses in the distance. Now the team is made ready, the two extra horses are attached in front, the coachman takes his place on the box, and with united strength our animals drag the heavy vehicle up out of the slough. We roll and jolt on again with lumps of wet clay dropping and splashing round ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... discovered the seventh primary planet, which he named, in honor of King George the Third, the Georgium Sidus. George the Third took him under his especial patronage, and constituted him his astronomer, with a handsome pension. He resided at Slough, near Windsor, ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... along smoothly until Pliable and Christian, (I and Jake), fell into the Slough of Despond. You know, in the book, Pliable and Christian are traveling together; they fall in the Slough of Despond; Pliable struggles and gets out. Christian, owing to the burden he carries on his back, flounders ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... little white-covered sofa in the parlor, never so soiled before. Mr. Chantrey sat gazing at the degraded, dying man. No deeper debasement could come to any human being; almost the likeness of a human being had been lost. The mire and slough of the ditch into which he had fallen still clung to him; for only his face had been hastily washed clean by his sister's hand; a face that had forfeited all intelligence and seemliness; a coarse, squalid, disfigured face. Yet Ann was not ...
— Brought Home • Hesba Stretton
... even the meanest situations in a well-ordered English household. Their resource is to take service with people only a step or two above the poorest class, with whom they fare scantily, endure harsh treatment, lead shifting and precarious lives, and finally drop into the slough of evil, through which, in their best estate, they do but pick their ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... him waiting for Tautuk and Amuk Toolik at the edge of a slough where willows grew deep and green and the crested billows of sedge-cotton stood knee-high. The faces of the herdsmen were sweating. Thereafter Alan walked with them, until in that hour when the sun had sunk to its lowest plane they came to the first ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... the great numerical majority of the inhabitants bear this character, he spoke truly, inasmuch as the great numerical majority of the inhabitants are negroes, among the most depraved in the island. Kingston is like the slough of Despond, a place whither all the scum and filth of the negro population in the east end of the island do continually run, and make it a very sink of wickedness. But are the white families and the large number ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... a poet. mall, a mallet. sew'er (so'er), one who sews. slough (sluf), a snake's skin. sew'er (su'er), a drain. slough, a miry place. court'e sy, civility. wear, a dam in a river. courte'sy, a slight bow. wear, waste. slav'er, a slave ship. min'ute (min'it), sixty seconds. slav'er, spittle. mi nute', very small. i'ron ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... got after her in the daytime. She had always outran them at night. She ran to the cabin and got her quarter which she had hid. She put the quarter in her mouth. The white folks didn't allow the slaves to handle no money. The quarter got stuck in her throat, and she went on down to the slough and drowned herself rather than let them beat her, and mark her up. Then patrollers sure would get you and beat you up. If they couldn't catch you when you were running away from them, they would come on your master's place and get you and beat you. The master would allow them to do it. ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Arkansas Narratives Part 3 • Works Projects Administration
... party with shrill cries sprang to their feet; the low cart was filling with water. They had left the canon and were crossing a slough; no one had remembered that it would be high tide. The girls, without an instant's hesitation, whipped their gowns up round their necks; but their feet were wet and their skirts draggled. They made light of it, however, as they did of everything, and drove up ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... renew'd in youth, the crested snake, Who slept the winter in a thorny brake; And, casting off his slough when spring returns, Now looks aloft, and with new glory burns: Restored with pois'nous herbs, his ardent sides Reflect the sun, and raised on spires he rides; High o'er the grass hissing he rolls along, And brandishes by fits ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In ...
— Nature • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... (California) describes the fall of a meteor in that vicinity, witnessed by Dr. Goodspeed, which fell in a slough and so heated the water as to kill the catfish that inhabited it. It lies in the pond, and looks as if a hundred feet wide. A much more marvellous story has been published of an engraved meteoric stone falling ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... Dudley, Gateshead, Halton, Hartlepool, Kirklees, Knowsley, Luton, Medway, Middlesbrough, Milton Keynes, North Tyneside, Oldham, Poole, Reading, Redcar and Cleveland, Rochdale, Rotherham, Sandwell, Sefton, Slough, Solihull, Southend-on-Sea, South Tyneside, St. Helens, Stockport, Stockton-on-Tees, Swindon, Tameside, Thurrock, Torbay, Trafford, Walsall, Warrington, Wigan, Wirral, Wolverhampton : counties: Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Cheshire, Cornwall, Cumbria, ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... on the other hand, insisted on the inviolability of Dublin College as a Protestant institution, inaccessible to Catholics, except through the slough of perverted and perjured faith. He would then have new colleges purely Catholic and entirely under the control of the Catholic bishops, but endowed by the State, and chartered to confer literary degrees. He would extend the same right to the members of other ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... comforted, and restored to his better self. He fell on his knees and thanked God for this crowning mercy. From his heart went forth a hymn of praise for the first time in long weeks. The words of the Man of Sorrows had lifted him above the slough. The marvel of it! How could he ever thank Him enough? His whole life should now be devoted to setting forth the wonders of His grace. When he arose he felt at peace with himself and full of goodwill to every one. He could ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... a lamp, trimmed with oil extracted from the shrawana and priyangn plants, its wick being made of cloth and the slough of the skins of snakes, is lighted, and long pieces of wood placed near it, those pieces of wood will resemble so ...
— The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana - Translated From The Sanscrit In Seven Parts With Preface, - Introduction and Concluding Remarks • Vatsyayana
... roun', and some had been killed on both sides. The Injuns killed two women on a ranch in the valley, and then we set in just to wipe 'em out. Their camp was in a bend of the river, near the head of the valley, with a deep slough on the right flank. There was about sixty of us, and Dave was our captain. He was a hard rider, a dead shot, and not very tender-hearted. The boys sorter liked him, but kep' a sharp eye on him, knowin' he was so quick and handy with a pistol. Our plan was to git to their camp ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... more money, I s'pose. Perhaps you've noticed that those who trust a good deal are usually poor. It's all right, Mr. Ellery; you go and take your walk. And I'll walk into that pantry closet. It'll be a good deal like walkin' into the Slough of Despond, but Christian came out on the other side and I guess likely I will, if the supply ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... while we were up in the second canal, the river rose several feet and was booming as we came out into it, and the strong current carried our boat against a drift on a small overflowed island, and came near sinking or capsizing it. Then the only way we could get off was down over a rough, shoaly slough, where she went like a bucking broncho. The next boat after us was manned by Alabamians, and they went over the lower rock dam that turned the water into the canal; being good swimmers, they got out, but ...
— The Southern Soldier Boy - A Thousand Shots for the Confederacy • James Carson Elliott
... she spoke, from the dead form of the woman on Osiris' knee there issued forth another form and stood before us, as a snake issues from its slough. And as was the dead Hataska so was this form, feature for feature, look for look, and limb for limb. But still the corpse rested upon Osiris' knee, for this was but the Ka that stood ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
... the Lord or the Devil," he said. "Let us ask Him more earnestly to bring her out of the slough on ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... tolde eek how Hemonides asterte, Whan Tydeus slough fifty knightes stoute. She tolde eek al the prophesyes by herte, And how that sevene kinges, with hir route, 1495 Bisegeden the citee al aboute; And of the holy serpent, and the welle, And of the furies, al she ...
— Troilus and Criseyde • Geoffrey Chaucer
... to-morrow." The word mister sounded sharply, yet not unpleasingly, to my ear: it was the first time I had been so designated or so dignified. Here was another evidence that I had, or ought to, cast from me the slough of boyhood, and enact, boldly, the man. I therefore summoned up courage to say that I did not perfectly understand the purport of the captain's order, and solicited ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... knife. Like most nervous persons, her feelings were intense. Such condemnation, remorse, and utter despair as took hold of her: it could not be called repentance, for that has "A purpose of heart and endeavour after new obedience." She was in the Slough of Despond. The twilight had deepened into darkness, when ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... walked on together, without looking whither they were going, and in the midst of the plain they fell into a very miry slough, which was called the Slough of Despond. Here they wallowed for a time, and Christian, because of the burden that was on his back, began to ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... hard hap, hard luck, hard lot; frowns of fortune; evil dispensation, evil star, evil genius^; vicissitudes of life, ups and downs of life, broken fortunes; hard case, hard lines, hard life; sea of troubles; peck of troubles; hell upon earth; slough of despond. trouble, hardship, curse, blight, blast, load, pressure. pressure of the times, iron age, evil day, time out of joint; hard times, bad times, sad times; rainy day, cloud, dark cloud, gathering clouds, ill wind; visitation, infliction; affliction &c (painfulness) 830; bitter ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... four grey horses of mettle, and each accompanied by outriders as well mounted, were advancing at a rapid pace along the road that leads from Slough to the College. But they were destined to an irresistible check. About fifty yards before they had reached the gate that leads into Weston's Yard, a ruthless but splendid Albanian, in crimson and gold embroidered jacket, and snowy camise, started forward, and holding out his silver-sheathed ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... to think. He braced himself against the cliff, and grasping his pike, awaited the assault of the beast. Either he or the wolf, or both together, would be tumbled into the slough. But there followed only a guttural word of command in Irish. Then a voice that he knew called, "Padraig, ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... in a wretched slough of helplessness, Dorothy found her conviction wavering. Could it really be possible that he was speaking the truth; that he did not know? But with the dreadful thought came also the realization that she must not let him fathom her mind. She told herself that she must ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... It took some time. We sped through Slough and Hounslow, and past the desolate winter fields. The grey air was as heavy as ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... around, entertained precisely the same opinion. It is not, therefore, surprising that two young men like Frank and Vernon should be well pleased with their quarters, or that, having so early gotten into the slough of love, they should daily continue to sink deeper into the mire. The young poet's lame leg, though not a very serious affair, was still sufficient to keep him for several days a close prisoner to the house; but if any one had asked him—no, we don't go so far as to say that, for if any ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... as a slough in the throat, or the mortified part of a carbuncle, if it be kept moist and warm, as during its abhesion to a living body, it will soon putrify. This, and the origin of contagion from putrid animal substances, seem to have ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... which have a complex signification always tend to slough off a part of their meaning*; and, especially, words that denote a state or property, together with its mode of growth or of manifestation, are prone to drop the latter, even though it may have given them root and ...
— A Manual of Moral Philosophy • Andrew Preston Peabody
... in the slough; May dream of glory, strive for fame, Thirst for the prestige of a name. And shall these friends, that so invite The study of the erudite, Ever as he beholds them now ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... Woodford, "he would say you were Christian floundering in the Slough of Despond, and deeming yourself one of its efts ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... will hardly be evident from my quotation. It is equally flat, but more articulate. I need not detain my reader with remarks upon him. The fact is, I am glad to have something, if not "a cart-load of wholesome instructions," to cast into this Slough of Despond, should it be only to see it ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... it is, for one whose foot is set Outside the slough of pain, to lesson well With admonitions him who lies therein. With perfect knowledge did I all I did, I willed to sin, and sinned, I own it all— I championed men, unto my proper pain. Yet scarce I deemed that, in such cruel doom, Withering upon this skyey ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... something sweeter, joy—joy that thrilled and vibrated through every nerve within him. Leaning against the portal, in an absurd delirium of delight—for it takes but a trifle to jerk those lovers from the slimiest depths of the Slough of Despond to the topmost peak of the mountain of ecstasy—he uncovered his head that the night-air might cool its feverish throbbings. But the night-air was as hot as his heart; and, almost suffocated by the sultry closeness, he was about to start for ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... estranged yourself from our society;" and continued, "I can't think you could have taken any offence at anything we may have done or said; but if so, upon your mentioning it, we will endeavour to make the amende honorable,"—he was perfectly reclaimed from his "slough of despond." At the same time he knew he could make no explanation, and therefore kept silent. What was he to do? he was again enslaved as hopelessly as ever; for the charm of Eleanor's presence he could not resist. How could he act ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... excitement, the utter divorce between the moral virtues and what is called religion, which obtain among the millions of the plantation negroes of the South, are but little understood. By one who knows it, the Black Belt has been called the great Dismal Swamp, the vast black malarial slough ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 50, No. 4, April 1896 • Various
... miles distant from Stoke lies the village of Slough, rendered famous by the residence of the celebrated astronomer, Sir William Herschel, and a short way further, on a gentle slope continued the whole way from Stoke, stand the venerable towers of time-honored ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... of winter—the cross-roads on which they moved were in the most frightful condition, insomuch that had not the zealous Mayor of Barbonne collected 500 horses, and come to their assistance, they must have been forced to leave all their artillery in a slough near that town; yet this determined band marched nearly forty miles ere they halted with the dark. Next morning they proceeded with equal alacrity, and at length debouched on the road by which Blucher's army was advancing, at Champaubert. Alsusieff and the central division were passing, ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... Canada. His letters were all of his inner life. He said much regarding his spiritual condition, of his grievous lapses of faith, of his days on the Delectable Mountains and of his descents into the Slough of Despond, but very little of the hills and valleys of his adopted country. Once, shortly after his arrival, he had stated that he was living in a shanty where the bush came right up to the door. Margaret had had some misgivings, but Cousin Griselda ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... skilled artizan of the thirteenth century almost precisely in the same relation as the bricklayer's labourer does to the mason in our own time. The sediment of the town population in the Middle Ages was a dense slough of stagnant misery, squalor, famine, loathsome disease, and dull despair, such as the worst slums of London, Paris, or Liverpool know nothing of. When we hear of the mortality among the townsmen during the periodical outbreaks of pestilence or famine, horror ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... if there's roast pork on the table, and I say a word to put him off it, he's that hurt as never was. Why, I'm only too glad to see him enjoying his food if no harm comes of it; but it's dreary work seeing your husband in the Slough of Despond, especially when it's your business to drag him out again, and most especially when you particularly warned him against ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... supposed he should have to see her once, to talk things over, settle something for their future. He had been sincere in saying that he bore her no ill-will; only he could never go back into that slough again. If he did, he knew he would inevitably be drawn under, slipping downward from concession ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... itself; then she perceived, beneath it, a corresponding mental prostration, a languor of horror more insufferable than the first rush of her disgust. The thought of having to wake every morning with this weight on her breast roused her tired mind to fresh effort. She must find some way out of the slough into which she had stumbled: it was not so much compunction as the dread of her morning thoughts that pressed on her the need of action. But she was unutterably tired; it was weariness to think connectedly. She lay back, ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... Marye or Marish in Buckinghamshire near Slough, a library was founded in 1623 by Sir John Kederminster "as well for the perpetual benefit of the vicar and curate of the parish of Langley, as for all other ministers and preachers of God's Word that would resort thither to make use of the books therein." ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... too late, happily, to drag you out of this wretched slough into which you are sinking. Whatever the cost, ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... of a piece with this setting. He fitted into it as an acorn fits its cup. All his life he had lived on Reelfoot, always in the one place, at the mouth of a certain slough. He had been born there, of a negro father and a half-breed Indian mother, both of them now dead, and the story was that before his birth his mother was frightened by one of the big fish, so that ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... the cozeners: for so soon as I came beyond Eton, they threw me off, from behind one of them, in a slough of mire; and set spurs and away, like three German ...
— The Merry Wives of Windsor - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... said the Knight, "to cast our slough before we chance to be seen by Indians, notwithstanding they may be friendly. We must retire deep, too, into the forest, for I mistake much the character of Winthrop and his council, if desperate means be not adopted to avenge ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... father, and my good lord," replied that pink of courtesy; "I did but wait to cast my riding slough, and to transmew myself into some civil form meeter for ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... "It matters a lot. The point is that it isn't you at all. Some day you'll slough it the way a butterfly ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... about the ground. Others had been wrecked but partially, with holes in the roofs and the windows shot out. The white pillars in front of colonnaded mansions had been shattered and the fallen columns lay in the icy slough. Long icicles hung from the burned portions of ...
— The Star of Gettysburg - A Story of Southern High Tide • Joseph A. Altsheler
... house with intent to find him. But our progress was very slow, and the moon rose in the skies before we stepped out on to the avenue and came in sight of the house and the terrace. There was so much to tell, so much that had to slough off its old seeming and take on new and radiant apparel—things that she had understood and not I, that I had caught and she missed, wherein both of us had gone astray most lamentably and now stood ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... the line there was something to get through—a swamp at least 1500 paces broad. One can hardly have an idea what this swamp was like, and how much trouble it cost us and our poor animals to get through it. This was a veritable 'Slough of Despond.' It was covered with water from one side to the other, and we had to wade through knee deep, and sometimes the water reached to our loins. The water was no serious obstacle, but the ground was of a morass-like nature that our animals sank in to their ...
— In the Shadow of Death • P. H. Kritzinger and R. D. McDonald
... cases. It cannot be taught by correspondence, and, simple though it sounds to hear it, it cannot be learned by attendance at a few clinics. It is delicate in this sense, that if it is not rightly performed in the individual case the glands will slough. That means loss of time, loss of temper, and the waste of a perfectly good pair of young goat-glands. Another very important thing which his experiments have taught Dr. Brinkley is this: the glands on being removed from the goat must immediately be placed in a ...
— The Goat-gland Transplantation • Sydney B. Flower
... wagon-wheels; the horses pulled, the drivers laid on the lash and a string of oaths at the same time; the wind blew, and the rain came down in torrents. More than once on that awful march did we lend a helping hand to get the horses out of some 'slough of Despond.' Over the mountains and through the woods we went, at the rate of about two miles an hour. Many gave out and lay down by the wayside; and when at last morning dawned, a more pitiable set of beings never were seen upon ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... secret bless'd, Above him in the clouds doth rest An oak-wreath, verdant and sublime, Placed on his brow in after-time; While they are banish'd to the slough, Who ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... things the London prentices were pugnacious, but as every one joined in the laugh against George, and he was, besides, stuck fast on a quaking tussock of grass, afraid to proceed or advance, he could not have his revenge. And when the slough was passed, and the slight rise leading to the copse of Saint John's Wood was attained, behold, it was found to be in possession of the lower sort of lads, the black guard as they were called. They were of course quite as ready to fight with the prentices ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the vast tundra regions of Northern Siberia the frozen soil had dissolved into a bottomless slough, from whose depths uprose prehistoric mammoths, their long hair matted with mud, and their curved tusks of ivory gleaming like trumpets over the field of their resurrection. The dispatch concluded with a heart-rending ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... first shell from his guns shrieked its message of death across the island. The gunboats concentrated their fire on the main battery which was located on low ground, almost submerged by the high water and separated from the others by a wide slough. Their gun platforms were covered with water—the men in gray must work their pieces standing half-leg deep in mud and slush. Five iron-clad gunboats led the attack. Three of them were lashed together in midstream and one lay under the shelter of each shore. Their concentrated ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... fine, thin, sticky, slimy, splashy, thick, heavy, dirty mud. Thousands of men and thousands of mules and horses are treading it to mortar. It is mixed with slops from the houses and straw from the stables. You are reminded of the Slough of Despond described by Bunyan in the Pilgrim's Progress,—a place for all the filth, sin, and slime of this world. Christian was mired there, and Pliable nearly lost his life. If Bunyan had seen Cairo, he might have made the picture still more graphic. There are old houses, ...
— My Days and Nights on the Battle-Field • Charles Carleton Coffin
... a degree of uncertainty about the graft retaining its vitality long enough to permit of its deriving the necessary nourishment from its new surroundings; in a certain number of cases the flap dies and is thrown off as a slough—moist or dry according to the presence or absence ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... wanted; he can be merry enough when there is occasion; he is ready for a row when his blood is well up; and he will take to his book, if you will give him a schoolmaster. What is he, indeed, but the rough block of English character? Hew him out of the quarry of ignorance; dig him out of the slough of everlasting labor; chisel him, and polish him; and he will come out whatever you please. What is the stuff of which your armies have been chiefly made, but this English peasant? Who won your Cressys, your Agincourts, your Quebecs, your Indies, East and West, and your Waterloos, but ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... square miles; the area of Suisun Bay, to the confluence of the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers, is sixty-three square miles. The total bay area is therefore four hundred and eighty square miles; and there are hundreds of miles of slough, river, and creek. A yachtsman, starting from Alviso, at the southern end of the bay, may sail in one general direction one hundred and fifty-four miles to Sacramento, before turning. All of this, of ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... She forgot to think about where the water came from, in the more pressing question, "What will Aunt Fortune say?"—and the quick wish came that she had her mother to go to. However, she got out of the slough, and wiping her shoes as well as she could on the grass, she hastened back to ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... and if beneath that gleam appears the horrid face of a withered old woman with fleshless fingers, ah, then! and we say it in the interests of young and pretty women, that woman is lost. She is at the mercy of the first man of her acquaintance who sees her in that Parisian slough. There is more than one street in Paris where such a meeting may lead to a frightful drama, a bloody drama of death and love, a drama of the ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... tale. Summer is come, for every spray now springs: The hart hath hung his old head on the pale; The buck in brake his winter coat he flings; The fishes flete with new repaired scale. The adder all her slough away she slings; The swift swallow pursueth the flies smale; The busy bee her honey now she mings; Winter is worn that was the flowers' bale. And thus I see among these pleasant things Each care decays, and yet my sorrow springs. HENRY HOWARD, ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... festoons of grape-vines,—where the air is sweet with woodland odors, and vocal with the song of birds. Then the deep cypress-swamp, where dark trunks rise like the columns of some vast sepulchre. Above, the impervious canopy of leaves; beneath, a black and root-encumbered slough. Perpetual moisture trickles down the clammy bark, while trunk and limb, distorted with strange shapes of vegetable disease, wear in the gloom a semblance grotesque and startling. Lifeless forms lean propped in wild disorder against the living, and from every rugged stem ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... of a stag that had dieted on serpents, the sinews of the remora, and the eyes of a dragon, the eggs of the eagle, the flying serpent of Arabia, the viper that guards the pearl in the Red Sea, the slough of the hooded snake, and the ashes that remain when the phoenix has been consumed. To these she adds all venom that has a name, the foliage of herbs over which she has sung her charms, and on which she had voided her ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... proposed method which under the existing system we miss. There is, of course, such a danger as that of providing too much liturgical variety. Amateur makers of Prayer Books almost invariably fall into this slough. Hymn-books, as is well known, often destroy their own usefulness by including too many hymns; and Prayer Books may do the same ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... daybreak, and for three leagues pressed on at tolerable speed. Then, for no reason stated, our guide gave us the slip as we passed through a wood, and was seen no more. We lost the road, and had to retrace our steps. We strayed into a slough, and extracted ourselves with difficulty. The man who was riding the bay I had purchased forgot the secret which I had imparted to him, and got an ugly fall. In fine, after all these mishaps it wanted little of noon, and less ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... this murder was not upon her. Even putting aside this painful doubt, she bore the name of the man who had savagely defied accountability and now, it seemed to her, was dragging her with him through the slough of blood and dishonor ...
— Whispering Smith • Frank H. Spearman
... white-oak trunk. A strange, wild strain, like a detached chord of a vesper melody, sounds above him! It is the whippoorwill—steadily, continuously, entrancingly the dulcet measure is taken up and echoed, until the slough of despond seems transformed into a varying diapason of melancholy minstrelsy. He dares not raise his head. It will vanish if he moves. He crouches, panting, almost exultant, in the sense of recovered faculties, or rather the suspension of numbing fear. How long will it last? He ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... find these rambles dull, but that their utter lack of interest amuses me. I will be honest with the reader, though, and any Master Pliable is free to forsake me at this point; for I cannot promise to be really livelier than my walk. There is a Slough of Despond in full view, and not a Delectable Mountain to be seen, unless you choose so to call the high lands about Waltham, which we shall behold dark blue against the western sky presently. As I sally forth upon Benicia Street, ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... the manner in which ten minutes in the society of a man, who would have been adjudged by many most uninspiring, had transformed me. It seemed the mere sight of this simple bushman, in his 'bell-bottomed' Sunday trousers, had lifted me up from a slough of hopeless inertia to a plane upon which life was a master musician, and all my veins the strings from which he drew ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... lingers the trace of beauty; and there, surely, though sepulchred in the caverns of vice, dwells something that was once innocence, and not unredeemable. But whence is the friendly word to come, whence the guardian hand that might lift them from the slough. They live accursed by even charity, shunned by philanthropy, and shut from the Christian world like a tribe of lepers whose touch is contagion and whose breath is pestilence. In the glittering halls of fashion, the high-born beauty, with wreaths about her white temples and diamonds upon ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood
... lifting his head cast suspicious glances at our party. But the two strollers, who were now in their element, played their parts with so much craft and delicacy, and with such an infinity of humour besides, that everything he overheard plunged him deeper in the slough. They knew something of local affairs, and called one another Mayor very naturally; and mentioning their wives, let drop other scraps of information that, catching his ear, made the wretched man every now and then sit up as if a wasp had stung him. One story ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... when it ought to be enlisted on the side of health. When sick (according to belief) you rush after drugs, search out the material so-called laws of 168:12 health, and depend upon them to heal you, though you have already brought yourself into the slough of disease through just this ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... the soul (or was it voluntarily assumed?)? This part of deity called individual soul certainly cannot be improved by its human conditions; and the question is not—"How soon can I pass through this slough of despond," but, "why was I thrust into it at all? Was it a mere ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... pays-back what money he had won at gambling," says the story;—he does not think any gain of that kind could be really his. It is very interesting, very natural, this "conversion," as they well name it; this awakening of a great true soul from the worldly slough, to see into the awful truth of things;—to see that Time and its shows all rested on Eternity, and this poor Earth of ours was the threshold either of Heaven or of Hell! Oliver's life at St. Ives and Ely, as a sober industrious Farmer, is it not altogether as that of a true and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... too, hoar-frost gathered at night by the light of the moon, and the ill-boding wings of a screech owl,[36] together with its flesh; and the entrails of an ambiguous wolf, that was wont to change its appearance of a wild beast into {that of} a man. Nor is there wanting there the thin scaly slough of the Cinyphian water-snake,[37] and the liver of the long-lived stag;[38] to which, besides, she adds the bill and head of a crow that had sustained {an existence of} nine ages. When, with these and a thousand other things without a name, the barbarian {princess} ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... their time. Legends tell you that the fiend rent them into fragments. Yes; the fiend of their own unholy desires and criminal designs! What they coveted, thou covetest; and if thou hadst the wings of a seraph thou couldst soar not from the slough of thy mortality. Thy desire for knowledge, but petulant presumption; thy thirst for happiness, but the diseased longing for the unclean and muddied waters of corporeal pleasure; thy very love, which usually elevates ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... contented and hopeful one. You have taught me to forget that my childhood and youth were one long night of wretchedness and degradation. You have taught me to forgive the father who suffered my life to be what it was, and made no one poor effort to lift me out of the slough of despond to which he had sunk. I can say no more, Charlotte. There are things that cannot ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... cause. Upon his friends R. H. D. had the same effect. And it was not only in proximity that he could distribute energy, but from afar, by letter and cable. He had some intuitive way of knowing just when you were slipping into a slough of laziness and discouragement. And at such times he either appeared suddenly upon the scene, or there came a boy on a bicycle, with a yellow envelope and a book to sign, or the postman in his buggy, or the telephone rang and from the receiver there poured into ...
— Appreciations of Richard Harding Davis • Various
... we could send all our crippled soldiers to relearn life, in places such as this; if, instead of some forty or fifty, forty or fifty thousand could begin again, under the gaze of that white windmill! If they could slough off here not only those last horrors, but the dinge and drang of their upbringing in towns, where wheels go round, lights flare, streets reek, and no larks sing, save some little blinded victim in a cage. ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy
... deep-toned sentence sang in Evan's heart. Rose and her mother were of one stamp. And Rose might speak for her mother. To take the hands of such a pair and be lifted out of the slough, he thought no shame: and all through the hours of the morning the image of two angels stooping to touch a leper, pressed on his brain like a reality, and went divinely through ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... their willingness to slough off even their children, in an adolescent impatience with any barrier to an immediate desire. So contrary is this to nature that regret follows closely their decision. The children, however, are laden with a burden put on them by their parents. ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... industry have always referred with satisfaction to the effect of the tariff of 1842 as an explicit and undeniable proof of the value of protection. It raised the country from a slough of despond to happiness, cheerfulness, confidence. It imparted to all sections a degree of prosperity which they had not known since the repeal of the tariff of 1828. The most suggestive proof of its strength and popularity was found in ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... betrothal in the following manner: "I marry because I wish to remain an honorable man. In the seventeenth century it was a proverbial expression, 'As corrupt as a priest,' and this might be said to-day. I marry, therefore, because I wish to get out of the Ultramontane slough."—Galignani's Messenger, September ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... be fixed according to the method invented by Herschel for telescopes. In the great instrument of the astronomer at Slough, the image of objects reflected by the mirror inclined at the bottom of the tube was formed at the other extremity where the eyeglass was placed. Thus the observer, instead of being placed at the lower end of the tube, was hoisted to the upper end, ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... an old person of Slough, Who danced at the end of a bough; But they said, "If you sneeze, you might damage the trees, You imprudent old person ...
— Nonsense Books • Edward Lear
... by his grace, and fooled him with his wit; he laid little plots to turn his mustache and guitar into ridicule; he seduced him into a hunt with the buckhounds (though Castleton himself had not hunted before since he was thirty), and drew him, spluttering German oaths, out of the slough of a ditch; he made him the laughter of the clubs; he put him fairly out of fashion,—and all with such suavity, and politeness, and bland sense of superiority, that it was the finest piece of high comedy you ever beheld. The poor prince, who had been coxcomb enough to lay a ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that Ward felt the jar of surprise when he looked down and saw the cabin below them. He glanced at Billy Louise, guessed from her somber face that the villainous mood still held her, and sighed a little. He was not deeply concerned by her mood. He understood her too well to descend into any slough of despondence because she was cross. Then he remembered the reason she had given—the reason he had not believed at the time. They were ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... your moss-traversing spunkies Decoy the wight that late and drunk is; The bleezin', curst, mischievous monkeys Delude his eyes, Till in some miry slough he sunk ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... the next few years. I continued to sink deeper and deeper into the slough. I knew all the drugstore clerks in New York by their first names, and they called me by mine. I no longer even had to specify the abomination I desired. I simply handed the man my ten cent check and said: "The ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... moment an instinct half-murderous leapt in me. It sank and was overwhelmed in a slough of some more ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... rock. But what can be done against an amorphous mass which gives like a jelly, collapses under the least pressure, and retains no imprint of it? All thought and energy and everything disappeared in the slough. When a stone fell there were hardly more than a few ripples quivering on the surface of the gulf: the monster opened and shut its maw, and there was left no trace ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... under their pessimist delineation, blackest Tartarean aspect, would crown it with the exhibition of the Indian, as one sunken, at the instance of the white, in extremest depths of human sorrow; as plunged, engulphed, and detained in a horrible slough of degradation and misery. Such would, in short, have an era opened up, which should mark, at once, the exaltation of the white to a revolting height of infamy, proclaiming the high carnival of unblushing trickery ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... labyrinths of blind ditches, to keep you down through life, stumbling and grovelling, hating yourself and hating the chain to which you cling—in that hour pray—pray as if the devil had you by the throat,—to Almighty God, to help you out of that cursed slough! There is nothing else for it!—pray, I ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... The hand of parental authority might have restrained the passions he had seen burning in the prisoner's eyes when the desperate man spoke the words which had seemed to doom his father to death. The sheriff felt that he might have saved this fiery spirit from the slough of slavery; that he might have sent him to the free North, and given him there, or in some other land, an opportunity to turn to usefulness and honorable pursuits the talents that had run to crime, perhaps to madness; ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... winter some way and then, while he was sitting in the train one day coming home, he overheard two men talking about turtles going up. Must have been two hotel men. Anyway, that gave Sam an idea and he started right in wading through Petersen's slough for turtles. Why, he pulled up barrels of them, and would you believe it, they sold in the city for real money! Sam went crazy—about as crazy as Mary Hagley got over her luck. And then along came rheumatism ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... preterlasi. Slipper pantoflo. Slippery glata. Slim gracia. Slime sxlimo. Slimy sxlima. Sling (stones) sxtonjxetilo. Slit fendo. Sloe prunelo. Slop versxeti. Slope deklivo. Slope (cut out) eltrancxi. Sloth mallaboremo. Slothful mallaborema. Slough sxlimejo. Sloven negligxulo. Slow malrapida. Slowness malrapideco. Slug limako. Sluggard mallaborulo. Slumber dormeti. Slut negligxulino. Sly ruza, kasxema. Small malgranda. Smallness malgrandeco. Small-pox variolo. Smart (to suffer) doloreti. Smart eleganta. Smash ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... that, coming to a bend where the coombe suddenly widened, and the stream without warning cast its green fringe of alders like a slough and slipped down a beach of flat pebbles to the head waters of a tidal creek, Mr. Molesworth rubbed his eyes with a start. Had the stream been a Naiad she could not have given him the go-by ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... nature of trade requires it. It is an old Anglicism, 'Such a man drives a trade;' the allusion is to a carter, that with his voice, his hands, his whip, and his constant attendance, keeps the team always going, helps himself, lifts at the wheel in every slough, doubles his application upon every difficulty, and, in a word, to complete the simile, if he is not always with his horses, either the wagon is set in a hole, or the team stands still, or, which is worst of all, the load is ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe
... gallant effort to clear the obstacle. But he was too heavily handicapped. He slipped as he rose to the leap. He blundered badly against the top bar of the gate, finally stumbled over and fell on the other side, pitching his rider headlong into a slough of trampled mud. ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... mistake, had put himself outside the sympathies of this comfortable circle. Miss Hitchcock was looking into the flowers in front of her, evidently searching for some remark that would lead the dinner out of this uncomfortable slough, when Brome Porter began ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... this the world awoke one morning to learn that silently and unheralded the American soldiers had marched from their quarters in a French village to the "front" and in a slough of mud had entered the trenches, and for the first time in history United States troops launched shells ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... the plan and intention, and really seemed to be inside the mind of the contriver. He would say; "I think the theme is weak here—and you can't make a weak place strong by filling it with details, however good in themselves. That is like trying to mend the Slough of Despond with cartloads of texts. The thing is not to fall in, or, if you fall in, to get out." His three divisions of a subject were "what you say, what you wanted to say, what you ought to have wanted to ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... near to a very miry Slough, that was in the midst of the plain; and they, being heedless, did both fall suddenly into the bog. The name of the slough was Dispond. Here they wallowed for a time, being grievously bedaubed with the dirt; and Christian, because of the Burden that was on his back, began to ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... her tale. Summer is come, for every spray now springs: The hart hath hung his old head on the pale; The buck in brake his winter coat he flings; The fishes flete with new repaired scale. The adder all her slough away she slings; The swift swallow pursueth the flies smale; The busy bee her honey now she mings; Winter is worn that ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... mild champagne, one after the other, as quickly as I could, but it did not quench my thirst. I was feverish and would have given anything in the world for something to interest me suddenly and have absorbed me and lifted me out of that slough in which my heart and my brain were being engulfed, as if in a quicksand. I did not venture to avow to myself what was making me so dejected, what was torturing me and driving me mad with grief, or to scrutinize ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... Beaconsfield to view a house, and had a fly from Slough, a drive of several miles. The house was in the middle of the town, large and convenient, with good garden and paddock; the whole was offered us for $200 yearly; and we should have taken it, had it not been in such a dismantled condition that the agent in whose hands it was placed ...
— Our Farm of Four Acres and the Money we Made by it • Miss Coulton
... joy and mighty shouts they bless; The rest allow his choice, and fortune praise, New vigor blushed through those looks of his; It seemed he now resumed his youthful days, Like to a snake whose slough new changed is, That shines like gold against the sunny rays: But Godfrey most approved his fortune high, And wished him honor, ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... a bed or the means of satisfying the most natural wants. Her husband, who was brought into the workhouse, begged to have his wife released from this imprisonment, whereupon he received twenty-four hours imprisonment, with bread and water, as the penalty of his insolence. In the workhouse at Slough, near Windsor, a man lay dying in September, 1844. His wife journeyed to him, arriving at midnight; and hastening to the workhouse, was refused admission. She was not permitted to see her husband until the next morning, and then only in the presence of a female ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... with appetites sharpened by traveling in the keen {238} December air. It was a God-send when they found a buffalo-bull mired fast. The famished men quickly despatched him, and by the efforts of twelve of their number dragged the huge carcass out of the slough. ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... can be attached to that bondage of manhood which was thrust upon the soul (or was it voluntarily assumed?)? This part of deity called individual soul certainly cannot be improved by its human conditions; and the question is not—"How soon can I pass through this slough of despond," but, "why was I thrust into it at all? Was it a mere sacred ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... little more than half way to Lectoure, and I was growing each minute more impatient when our road, which had for a little while left the river bank, dropped down to it again, and I saw before us another crossing, half ford half slough. My men tried it gingerly and gave back and tried it again in another place; and finally, just as Mademoiselle and her brother came up to them, floundered through and sprang ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... losing, but gaining in their sympathies and help. This trying year—trying to so many, therefore trying to us—brings a jubilee thanksgiving to us, in that we are not sinking deeper into the horrible pit and miry clay of debt, but are little by little being pulled out of the slough. We know not how long the pull may be, but if those who love the Lord Jesus Christ will pull all together we shall not fail, and we need not be discouraged. Our feet will get upon a rock and our goings be ...
— American Missionary, Volume 50, No. 8, August, 1896 • Various
... so many years since he had thought of her, and the picture he really had of her was buried in the bitter salt slough of tears in the depths of his recollections, which he was far from being in the mood to stir up. There were things within him, which he avoided from an instinctive feeling of safety in the whole of his new, happy existence; but such a thing as finding his mother again ...
— One of Life's Slaves • Jonas Lauritz Idemil Lie
... gambling," says the story;—he does not think any gain of that kind could be really his. It is very interesting, very natural, this "conversion," as they well name it; this awakening of a great true soul from the worldly slough, to see into the awful truth of things;—to see that Time and its shows all rested on Eternity, and this poor Earth of ours was the threshold either of Heaven or of Hell! Oliver's life at St. Ives ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... hope it won't be that long before we have any good news," said Betty, trying to speak lightly. This would never do, she thought. They simply had to find some way out of this terrible slough of despondency before it ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Bluff Point - Or a Wreck and a Rescue • Laura Lee Hope
... this assume, under their pessimist delineation, blackest Tartarean aspect, would crown it with the exhibition of the Indian, as one sunken, at the instance of the white, in extremest depths of human sorrow; as plunged, engulphed, and detained in a horrible slough of degradation and misery. Such would, in short, have an era opened up, which should mark, at once, the exaltation of the white to a revolting height of infamy, proclaiming the high carnival of unblushing trickery and chicane; and should signalize ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... 30. Noon. Miserable, utterly miserable. We have camped in the 'Slough of Despond.' The tempest rages with unabated violence. The temperature has gone to 33 deg.; everything in the tent is soaking. People returning from the outside look exactly as though they had been in a heavy shower ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... was who ran along the river bank, Who stumbled through each drift and slough, and ever slipped and sank, And ever cursed his Maker's name, ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... social ethics which recognizes the rights and claims of the individual. The condition of woman is that of the basest slave, a slave to the caprice and tyranny of her master. Communism raises her from the slough of slavery, but subjects her to the level of prostitution. An inevitable sequence of polygamy is a decline of literature and science. The natural tendency of each system is to sensualism., The blood is diverted from its normal channels and the ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... the Queen, amused. "What of that? Thy name is not Cis, is it? 'Tis only the slough that serves thee for the nonce. The good youth will find himself linked to some homely, housewifely Cis in due time, when the Princess Bride is queening it in France or Austria, and will own that the well was wiser ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... August, 1825:—"Taylor has dropt the 'London'. It was indeed a dead weight. It was Job in the Slough of Despond. I shuffle off my part of the pack, and stand like Christian ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... and deplore. He inveighed against the low standards of the masses, and went on his way sadly, making all the money he could at his private calling, and keeping his hands clean from the slime of the political slough. He was a censor and a gentleman; a well-set-up, agreeable, quick-witted fellow, whom his men companions liked, whom women termed interesting. He was apt to impress the latter as earnest and at the same time fascinating—an alluring ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... junction flashes into sight, and again your choice is made; negligently enough, perhaps, but still with a view to what you consider the greatest good, present or prospective. One line may lead through the Slough of Despond, and the other across the Delectable Mountains, but you don't know whether the section will prove rough or smooth, or whether it ends in a junction or a terminus, till the cloven mists of the Future melt into a manifest Present. We know what ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... not, however, abuse the advantage your quotation has given me, by overwhelming you with the refutation with which the victim Cassio replies to the tempter Iago. I only wish you to know, that there is one person at least sorry to see a youth of talents and expectations sink into the slough in which the inhabitants of this house ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... of her life. At length the wily parson succeeded in getting to the stormy heart of this enraged and unhappy father, and portrayed in glowing colors the clearness of Miss Elizabeth's "effectual call" and "blessed hope," and managed to bridge over "that awful slough of Methodism" by descanting gravely upon some of the "mysterious leadings of sovereign grace." "And now, if our dear lamb of the Saviour can be rescued from those deluded people and carefully instructed in 'the doctrines ...
— Elizabeth: The Disinherited Daugheter • E. Ben Ez-er
... shaken, was jerked out of the saddle, and must have fallen, ignominiously, face downward in her Slough of Despond, but that Lenox,—reaching her in the nick of time—caught and crushed her in ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... guide had made a mistake, and that he was leading him into dangerous country; but he did not wish to show any suspicion of his judgment, and made no remark. Again the horses rose up out of the slough across which they had been wading and enjoyed for a short time some hard ground; but they soon had to leave it, to wade on as before. On every side was heard the loud croaking of frogs; their heads poked up in all the shallower marshes, with the object, it seemed, of observing ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... argument. It will be urged, for instance, that, in confessing that the Science of Morals can never be as exact as that of Mathematics, because we have no terminology for Ethics so exact as for Geometry, she, in effect, yields the whole question, and leaves us in the old slough of doubt where Pyrrho and Pascal delighted to thrust us, and where the Church threatens to keep us, unless we will pay her tolls and pick our way along her turnpike. But though her major and minor premises may not be on the best terms with ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... the Jews have not fled a hundred leagues from this Slough of Despond. The answer is, because they were born there. Moreover, the taxation is light, and rent is moderate. Add that, when famine has been in the land, or the inundations of the Tiber have spread ruin and devastation ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... the impression he was making on Cardigan. Again his faith in the psychology of the mind found its absolute verification. Cardigan, lifted unexpectedly out of the slough of despond by the very man whom he expected to condemn him, became from that moment, in the face of the mental reaction, almost hypersympathetic. When finally he left the room, Kent was inwardly rejoicing. For Cardigan had told him it would be ...
— The Valley of Silent Men • James Oliver Curwood
... weight heavy as frost and deep almost as life; the fountains of natural fancy and mirth are frozen over; so Baby lisps his dawn paeans in soft Oriental accents, wakening harmonious echoes amongst those impulsive and impressionable children of Nature that masque themselves in the black slough of Bearers and Ayahs; and Baby ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... killed all your mules for you, before I shot down your dogs—but not being exactly Phoibos Apollon, you are to know further that when I did think I might go modestly on, ... [Greek: omoi], let me get out of this slough of a simile, never mind with what dislocation of ancles! Plainly, from waiting and turning my eyes away (not from you, but from you in your special capacity of being written-to, not spoken-to) when I turned again you had grown ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... heart, but a great deal of something sweeter, joy—joy that thrilled and vibrated through every nerve within him. Leaning against the portal, in an absurd delirium of delight—for it takes but a trifle to jerk those lovers from the slimiest depths of the Slough of Despond to the topmost peak of the mountain of ecstasy—he uncovered his head that the night-air might cool its feverish throbbings. But the night-air was as hot as his heart; and, almost suffocated by the sultry closeness, he ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... one as I, A plain rough gunner with one only pip. No doubt 'twas destined for some lofty soul Who in a deck-chair lolls, and marks the map And says, "Push here," while I and all my kind Scrabble and slaughter in the appointed slough. But I, presumptuous, wore it, till the gods Called for my ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, October 31, 1917 • Various
... special facilities for getting rid of trouble after a decent interval. Whilst a slow nature was imbibing a misfortune little by little, she had swallowed the whole agony of it at a draught and was brightening again. She could slough off a sadness and replace it by a hope as easily as a ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... which is his portion, and where he rules supreme, and for ever to aspire to a realm from which he is shut out. He is convinced that with the help of a woman he may redeem himself—and sinks deeper and deeper into the slough of his own sensuality. He becomes malevolent, cruel and callous; the pleasure whose slave he ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... snake, when he casts his skin, leaves the slough behind him, and winds on his way ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... after I jined Colonel Baker's Gang, we wuz comin' frum Fulton to Clipper through de Red River bottoms. De river wuz overflowin' an' as we wuz crossin' a deep, swift slough, Colonel Baker and his horse got tangled up in some grape vines. Colonel Baker yelled, and I turned my mule around and cut all de grape vine loose wid my Bowie knife. Dere ain't nothin' like a mule for swimmin'. Dey can swim circles aroun' any horse. ...
— Slave Narratives: Arkansas Narratives - Arkansas Narratives, Part 6 • Works Projects Administration
... rolls and eggs. He's certainly bringing good things in his wake. How delicious that chicken does smell! Let's take it as a good omen, Alec, a forerunner of better days. He'll surely get you out of your slough ...
— Flip's "Islands of Providence" • Annie Fellows Johnston
... entanglement of trees, bushes, and vines, their scent of flowers and song of birds; or the broad sunshine of the savanna, where they waded to the neck in grass; or the deep swamp, where, out of the black and root-encumbered slough, rise the huge buttressed trunks of the Southern cypress, the gray Spanish moss drooping from every bough and twig, wrapping its victims like a drapery of tattered cobwebs, and slowly draining away their life, for even plants devour each other, and ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... slowness of the heart's action. When the effect of the poison has become sufficient to entirely arrest the circulation in any part, the structures soon die. The disorder manifests itself as lameness in one or more limbs; swelling about the ankle which may result in only a small slough or the loss of a toe, but it may circumscribe the limb at any point below the knee or hock by an indented ring below which the tissues become dead. The indentation soon changes to a crack, which extends ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... the gipsies, but a much more showy-looking personage. Jerry was no longer a gentleman of "three outs"—the difficulty would now have been to say what he was "without." Snakelike he had cast his slough, and rejoiced in new and brilliant investiture. His were "speaking garments, speaking pockets too." His linen was of the finest, his hose of the smartest. Gay rings glittered on his fingers; a crystal snuff-box underwent graceful ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... he exclaimed again, knowing that if he could only start her to talking she would soon drag herself out of her slough ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... those who were in the dreadful slough from which he had been lifted, soon began stirring in his heart, and he sought, by various methods, to influence and save them. After working for several months, with only partial success, it became evident, that for sure and ...
— Grappling with the Monster • T. S. Arthur
... as darkness was beginning to come on, we came to an almost impassable slough in the trail, where a small stream descended into a little flat marsh and morass. This had been used as a camping-place by others, and we decided to camp, because to travel, even in the twilight, was ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... employed her influence to his hurt. And it only made her fault the greater that Julian was himself unconscious of his degradation. She commenced to feel a personal responsibility commanding her to rescue him from his slough, which was increased moreover by a fear that her persuasions might prove ineffectual. For Julian's manner pointed now to an utter absence of feeling so far as ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... hurrying. Besides, a solemn action has to be performed before the emigration. The animal must cast its skin; and the moult is an event that does not fall on the same date for all. The evacuation of the place, therefore, lasts several days. It is effected in small squads, as the slough is flung aside. ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... though, both on ye kin hitch on next load," drawled the driver, turning his horses into the slough of mud ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... through a slough and a wilderness, and my inner man needeth refreshment; let us even partake of the savoury pies wherewith the provident care of thy father hath ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... artillery had opened, when I left him again for Morgan's front. I found Morgan where I left him, and the troops advancing. I had understood that he was to lead his division, and asked about it, but, getting no satisfaction, pushed for the front, crossing the slough at the little bridge at the head of the bayou. I found the willows cut off eighteen inches or two feet long, with sharp points above the mud, making it slow and difficult to pass, save at the bridge. ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... good cause. Upon his friends R. H. D. had the same effect. And it was not only in proximity that he could distribute energy, but from afar, by letter and cable. He had some intuitive way of knowing just when you were slipping into a slough of laziness and discouragement. And at such times he either appeared suddenly upon the scene, or there came a boy on a bicycle, with a yellow envelope and a book to sign, or the postman in his ...
— Appreciations of Richard Harding Davis • Various
... horrible. To struggle therein is hideous; at the same time that one is going through the death agony, one is floundering about. There are shadows enough for hell, and mire enough to render it nothing but a slough, and the dying man knows not whether he is on the point of becoming a spectre or ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... however, that, once there, this brother would find a difficulty in getting rid of him. He thought with longing of that clean and healthy life, the escape from the slough into which his feet would always wander while he remained here. The means to escape he now ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... whispers; and from our position at the time, and from the alteration of the sail, which I could dimly make out above me as a blot against the stars, I knew the junk was being headed into the mouth of a small slough which emptied at that point into ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... highest the help is nighest? We may find aid for you yet, and sooner than you are aware of. I am sure I would never have advised you to such a course, but only you had set heart and eye on pretty Mistress Marget, and less would not serve you—and what could I do but advise you to cast your city-slough, and try your ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... Potts's; and not only did their two guests think so, but the whole country, far and wide around, entertained precisely the same opinion. It is not, therefore, surprising that two young men like Frank and Vernon should be well pleased with their quarters, or that, having so early gotten into the slough of love, they should daily continue to sink deeper into the mire. The young poet's lame leg, though not a very serious affair, was still sufficient to keep him for several days a close prisoner to the ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... your case becomes desperate draw on me under the name A.Z., and I will understand. Your financial affairs are in desperate condition but the case is not hopeless. You are young and healthy but you lack a definite plan of life. If someone will throw you a line while you are floundering in this slough you will come out all right. Now what's this thing you are to do ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... through this Slough of Despond, he was called to Washington by his patent lawyer. Not having enough money to pay the cost of such a journey, he borrowed the price of a return ticket from Sanders and arranged to stay with a friend in Washington, to save a hotel bill that he could ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... her intense love of the country and keen anticipation of the joy to be found at Burnham Beeches, and when the train stopped at Slough the compartment mentioned to her that this was where she ought to alight. Gertie, interposing, said that they were, in reality, going further. On Miss Radford asking, in astonished tones, "Whatever for?" she received information that the desire was to get well away from ...
— Love at Paddington • W. Pett Ridge
... kinds of human nature. If I hadn't, I'd have more money, I s'pose. Perhaps you've noticed that those who trust a good deal are usually poor. It's all right, Mr. Ellery; you go and take your walk. And I'll walk into that pantry closet. It'll be a good deal like walkin' into the Slough of Despond, but Christian came out on the other side and I guess likely I will, if the supply of soapsuds ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... and even in denunciations; and he predicted that the Narodnaya Volya, which had organised the various acts of terrorism culminating in the assassination of the Emperor, would never develop into a powerful revolutionary party. It had sunk into the slough of untruth, and it could only continue to deceive the Government and ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... his officers, who shared with the men every hardship and every fatigue; each realised his individual duty to make the very best of a very bad job, and pluckily kept heart till the last moment. Torrents of rain fell, making the night into one vast immensity of slough and pool, but the stumbling, straining left, right, left, right, of the retreating men continued ceaselessly through the weary hours. On Thursday morning, the 26th, to their intense relief, they found themselves at last in ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... people of the armistice were weary and apprehensive—weary of the war, weary of politics, weary of the worn-out framework of existence, and filled with a vague, nameless apprehension of the unknown. They feared that in the chaotic slough into which they had fallen they had not yet touched bottom. None the less, with the exception of fervent Catholics and a number of earnest sectarians, there were few genuine ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... Then and there I made a covenant with my soul; and no other man's arms shall ever enfold you. Ah, my Rosa Alba! I could dig your grave with my own hands, sooner than see that thief claim you. I am a proud man, and you have dragged me through the slough of humiliation, but to-day, as I bid you good-bye, I realize how one felt, who looking at the bust of him she loved supremely, said with her last breath: 'Voila mon univers, mon espoir, et mes dieux!' How soon we meet again depends solely on your future course. You know the conditions; ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... failure rather to my own inexperience and mistake than to a want of skill or fidelity in my instructors. And thus for a time I was occupied by exploded systems, mingling, like an unadept, a thousand contradictory theories and floundering desperately in a very slough of multifarious knowledge, guided by an ardent imagination and childish reasoning, till an accident again changed the current of my ideas. When I was about fifteen years old we had retired to our house near Belrive, when we witnessed a most violent ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... themselves, I must now return to the weary chapter of European diplomacy, to trace the tortuous course of popes and princes, duping one another with false hopes; saying what they did not mean, and meaning what they did not say. It is a very Slough of Despond, through which we must plunge desperately as we may; and we can cheer ourselves in this dismal region only by the knowledge that, although we are now approaching the spot where the mire is deepest, the ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... simplest, the most transparent of allegories. Unlike the Faery Queene, the story of Pilgrim's Progress has no reason for existing apart from its inner meaning, and yet its reality is so vivid that children read of Vanity Fair and the Slough of Despond and Doubting Castle and the Valley of the Shadow of Death with the same belief with which they read of ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... while he was sitting in the train one day coming home, he overheard two men talking about turtles going up. Must have been two hotel men. Anyway, that gave Sam an idea and he started right in wading through Petersen's slough for turtles. Why, he pulled up barrels of them, and would you believe it, they sold in the city for real money! Sam went crazy—about as crazy as Mary Hagley got over her luck. And then along came rheumatism and knocked Sam flat, just when he was doing so well. Everybody said it was just poor ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... happy. I have brought some solace and light into your days, Eleanor? If I died to-morrow, or was lost from sight, you would look back and say: 'He gave me my dearest hours, my most treasured memories. He brought me from the slough of despond to the sunshine of ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... carried a load of from 800 to 1,000 pounds. These vehicles were admirably adapted to the country, which was in a perfectly natural state, without roads of any kind, except the trail worn by the carts. They could easily pass over a slough that would obstruct any other forms of wheeled carriage, and one man could drive four or five of them, each being hitched behind the other. They were readily constructed on the border, by the unskilled half-breeds, where iron was unobtainable. This trade, with an occasional ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... work was no disgrace, and the wages of work were plentiful. To live without work was the lot of none. What blessing above these blessings was needed to make a people great and happy? And now a stranger visiting them would declare that they are wallowing in a very slough of despond. The only trade open is the trade of war. The axe of the woodsman is at rest; the plow is idle; the artificer has closed his shop. The roar of the foundery is still heard because cannon are needed, and the river of molten iron comes out as an implement of death. The ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... fitting opportunity to explain how such a union is not only consistent with, but necessitated by, sound logic. I purposed to lead you through the territory of vital phaenomena to the materialistic slough in which you find yourselves now plunged, and then to point out to you the sole path by which, in my judgment, ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... askance at Gaunt's worn face, as he trotted along beside him, thinking how pure it was. What had he to do with this foul slough, we were all mired in? What if the Yankees did come, like incarnate devils, to thieve and burn and kill? This man would say "that ye resist not evil." He lived back there, pure and meek, with Jesus, in the old time. He ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... was on the point of starting; he bribed his way on to the box and, seated in glory beside the driver, proclaimed aloud the downfall of the Corsican bandit and passed about the warm liquid joy. They clattered through Uxbridge, Slough, Maidenhead. Sleeping Reading was awakened by the great news. At Didcot one of the ostlers was so much overcome by patriotic emotions and the 1760 brandy that he found it impossible to do up the buckles of the harness. The night began to grow chilly, and Sir ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... of an animal, supposed to be a cow, found two feet below the surface, in digging for the Great Western Railway, near Slough. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 18, 1841 • Various
... until our souls are strong enough To plunge into the crater of the Scheme — Triumphant in the flash there to redeem Love's handsel and forevermore to slough, Like cerements at a played-out masque, the rough And reptile skins of us whereon we set The stigma of scared years — are we to get Where atoms and the ages are ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... in his hearty, cheery voice, which alone had lifted many a poor fellow from the slough of misery, and put new heart and soul in him, since his ministrations began in the hospital,—"Colonel, your aids are ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... length, and soaked with rain, I left the slough, and gaining the highroad, pressed towards the city to meet the cavalcade. A rushing of people, and a confused cry, told me of its approach. "There he is!" Yes, there! in that open cart, surrounded by mounted police, ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... years, thirty-one great frescoes for little more than my sustenance. Yea; and for my belly's sake I might have accepted the life of a cowled monk, had not Chigi in the nick of time drawn me from that slough with the announcement that Peruzzi had completed the building of his villa, and that it was ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... as really bear flowers at all. For most races and nations during the most of their life are not progressive but simply stagnant, sometimes just managing to preserve their standard customs, sometimes slipping back to the slough. That is why history has nothing to say about them. The history of the world consists mostly in the memory of those ages, quite few in number, in which some part of the world has risen above itself and burst into flower ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... camp were in a deplorable condition. They were merely tracks trodden down by our feet and carts, heavily rutted, uneven, and either a slough of mud and water, or a desert of dust, according to the weather. We persistently urged the German authorities to improve these roads, but they turned a deaf ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... is of the genus bufo, he is by no means a buffo genius. He may be styled the solemn organist of the swamp; slough music being his specialty. Like other out-door performers on wind instruments, he is chiefly heard in pleasant weather, and during the summer his organ is without stops. Being a Democrat, he appreciates the dignity of labor, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 8, May 21, 1870 • Various
... the pamphlet which caused Shelley's expulsion from Oxford; and Stockdale hoped to be regarded as a friend of the family by telling Sir T. all about it, and thus preventing a young aristocrat of such high birth and pretensions from falling into the slough of the blackguard Free-thinkers. No doubt he was influenced to do this good turn to the family by the fact that the bill for the last romance was unpaid, and he knew that if Sir Timothy would not, and Shelley, being a minor, could not, liquidate it, he would, between the two unreliable stools, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... 1844.—The Commissioners of Police having issued orders that several officers of the detective force shall be stationed at Paddington to watch the movements of suspicious persons, going by the down train, and give notice by the electric telegraph to the Slough station of the number of such suspected persons, and dress, their names (if known), also the carriages ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various
... world. One shows the shining, swelling St. Lawrence River and the dead hour of night, and those slowly moving boats of hushed heroes creeping across the waters to where the mighty Quebec hills gloomed hugely out. The other is of that quiet church-yard in England, at Stoke Pogis, near Slough, where pilgrims from many parts of the world still wander through the pleasant Buckinghamshire fields to stand ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... with great crevasses, which we could only succeed in clearing by the help of our planks. I noticed in this part several small mounds of ice in such a liquefying condition that the slightest touch would suffice to break it and convert the mound into a round slough. The ice upon which we were travelling was without consistency, was but a foot in thickness, and—what was more—was riddled with holes.... I could only compare the appearance of the sea, at this stage, to an immense morass; and indeed the muddy water which issued from ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... troubles to that? One vision of unseen things, rushing in, made small all the things that are seen. The poor old cripple, deformed and diseased, whose days must have been long a burden to her, was going even now to drop the slough of her mortality and to take on her the robes of light and the life that is all glory. What if my own life were barren for a while; then comes the end! What if I must be alone in my journey; I may do the Master's work all the way. And this is His work; to set the captive free; light ...
— Daisy in the Field • Elizabeth Wetherell
... thoughts. He has lived in the Bible till its words have become his own. He has lived among its visions and voices of heaven till all sense of possible unreality has died away. He tells his tale with such a perfect naturalness that allegories become living things, that the Slough of Despond and Doubting Castle are as real to us as places we see every day, that we know Mr. Legality and Mr. Worldly Wiseman as if we had met them in the street. It is in this amazing reality of impersonation that Bunyan's imaginative ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... carpentry, his greenhouse—"Is not our greenhouse a cabinet of perfumes?"—his clergymen, his ladies, and his tasks, he is not only constantly amusing himself, but carrying on a secret battle, with all the terrors of Hell. He is, indeed, a pilgrim who struggles out of one slough of despond only to fall waist-deep into another. This strange creature who passed so much of his time writing such things as Verses written at Bath on Finding the Heel of a Shoe, Ode to Apollo on an Ink-glass almost dried in the Sun, Lines sent with Two ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... of this action and recognized that his country could not emerge from the slough of revolution without American assistance, he was depressed at the condition of affairs, and in view of his physical feebleness felt himself unequal to the task of guiding the country through impending difficulties. He therefore on May 6, 1916, ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... and all causes have since that day worked together for its fulfilment. We too must be purified by fire and sword; and may we not hope that our beloved country may emerge from the slaughter, the ruin, and the conflagration, more prosperous, more powerful than ever before, and casting off the slough of impurity that has for long years been hardening upon her, renovated and redeemed by the struggle, sweep majestically on to a purer and nobler destiny than even our past has given promise of, and attain a loftier position than ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... may be compelled to grovel, to wallow in the mire of sensual indulgence, but it always rebels and enters its protest. It can never forget that it bears the image of its Maker, even when dragged through the slough of sensualism. The still small voice which bids man look up is never quite hushed. If the victim of the lower nature could only forget that he was born to look upward, if he could only erase the image of his Maker, if he ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... sight, dead in the body, in daily act, but living yet in spirit, and influencing the commonplace facts to which they have yielded the field, permeating the everyday routine with the ennobling power of lofty desires, and keeping the wayworn traveller from sinking into the slough of materialism or the quicksands of utter weariness. The man who in his youth dreamed of elevating his kind by a noble employment of the gifts of genius, may find that genius apparently useless, a hindrance even to prosperity, but ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... well, and knew that since Graham's impetuous outbreak he had been wavering sadly, and since Plume's parting visit had been plunged in a mental slough of doubt and distress. Once before his stubborn Scotch nature had had to strike its colors and surrender to his own subaltern, and now the same struggle was on again, for what Plume said, and said in presence of grim old ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... immediately beyond the ranch itself. The plains were broad. Here and there the flatness broke in a long, low line of cottonwoods marking the winding course of a slough or trace of subsoil water. Mesquite lay in dark patches; sagebrush; the green of pasture-land periodically overflowed by the irrigation water. Nearer at home were occasional great white oaks, or haystacks bigger than a house, and shaped ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... and stone-flinging phase of free-thinking, knowing nothing of the deep yearnings any more than of the supreme wretchlessness of the human soul, which it kept imprisoned within the narrow limits of earth and time. At the outcome from the bloody slough of the French Revolution and from the chaos it caused in men's souls, it was the infidelity of Voltaire which remained at the bottom of the scepticism and moral disorder of the France of our day. The demon which torments her is even more Voltairian ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... there were the masses—hewers of wood and drawers of water—standing to the skilled artizan of the thirteenth century almost precisely in the same relation as the bricklayer's labourer does to the mason in our own time. The sediment of the town population in the Middle Ages was a dense slough of stagnant misery, squalor, famine, loathsome disease, and dull despair, such as the worst slums of London, Paris, or Liverpool know nothing of. When we hear of the mortality among the townsmen during ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... not judge a man's whole intellectual character, and declare him to be incapable of poetry, on the score of a few legal papers about matters of business. Apparently Shakspere helped that Elizabethan Mr. Micawber, his father, out of a pecuniary slough of despond, in which the ex-High Bailiff of the town was floundering,— pursued by the distraint of one of the friendly family of Quiney— Adrian Quiney. They were neighbours and made a common dunghill ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... slough on the place which was full of beaver and beaver dams. How I tried to get one of them, always without success! They were very crafty, very alert, and at the slightest indication of danger dived under water to the doors of their houses, long before one was in gunshot of them. Full many a weary ...
— Out of Doors—California and Oregon • J. A. Graves
... Observe that Barrus, vilest of ill weeds! Plain beacons these for heedless youth, whose taste Might lead them else a fair estate to waste:" If lawless love were what he bade me shun, "Avoid Scetanius' slough," his words would run: "Wise men," he'd add, "the reasons will explain Why you should follow this, from that refrain: For me, if I can train you in the ways Trod by the worthy folks of earlier days, And, while you need direction, ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... of their troubles was not helping the Days out of their particular Slough of Despond. So many difficulties seemed reaching out to clutch at Janice and Daddy! The girl thought it was like walking through a briar-patch. Every step ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... greatest modern astronomer, died at Slough in England. Herschel was born in 1738 at Hanover. He was a musician of rare skill and a self-taught mathematician of great ability. In 1757, he deserted the band of Hanoverian Guards in which he played the oboe, although a ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... Captain strictly forbade it on board his lugger; but he, also continuing to get no fish, called out, 'Swear away, lads, and see what that'll do.' Perhaps he only meant as Menage's French Bishop did; who going one day to Court, his carriage stuck fast in a slough. The Coachman swore; the Bishop, putting his head out of the window, bid him not do that; the Coachman declared that unless he did, his horses would never get the carriage out of the mud. 'Well then, says the Bishop, ...
— Two Suffolk Friends • Francis Hindes Groome
... proportion, and after first neglecting and then over-praising him, finally proposes to give poor old Severn his due as a master by proxy. Imagine Sir William Herschel's pleasure when his beloved sister Caroline begins to receive her full deserts. And Tschaikowsky will slough his morbidness and improvise a Slavic Hallelujah Chorus when his unseen patroness comes into her own. It is true that the world has already given her memory two fingers and a perfunctory "thank ye." This was for putting her purse at Tschaikowsky's disposal, ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... depression in 1861, and expressed it strongly in a long letter when Atlanta had fallen and he had won his commission as major-general in the regular army. "I confess I owe you all I now enjoy of fame," he said, "for I had allowed myself in 1861 to sink into a perfect 'slough of despond.'" Halleck's friendship and encouragement had put him in the way of recovering from this. [Footnote: Official Records, vol. xxxviii. pt. v. p. 791.] But now his faith in human nature was rudely shocked by finding, apparently, this friendly ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... used on the estate could not very well carry it, and a sledge was substituted. Several times, during the journey through the forest, the sledge had to be halted while the underwood was cut away to permit of its passing; and once a slough had to be filled up with branches hewn from fir trees, and bundles of fern. These delays made it evening before the shore of the creek ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... coarse feeler, and an egotist. The second was a Parisienne, externally refined—at heart, corrupt—without a creed, without a principle, without an affection: having penetrated the outward crust of decorum in this character, you found a slough beneath. She had a wonderful passion for presents; and, in this point, the third teacher—a person otherwise characterless and insignificant—closely resembled her. This last-named had also one other distinctive ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... master, boarding-house master and tutor in England. These know well what the difficulties are; these know that a short cut to any subject is often a long way round: that a short cut to religion leads too often either to a slough of doubt or else to a pharisaical hilltop, from which there is no path to the great mountains where the Holy ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... away with the cozoners: for so soone as I came beyond Eaton, they threw me off, from behinde one of them, in a slough of myre; and set spurres, and away; like ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... it's a marcy we've gut folks to tell us The rights an' the wrongs o' these matters, I vow—— God sends country lawyers, an' other wise fellers, To start the world's team w'en it gits in a slough; Fer John P. Robinson he Sez the world'll go right, ef ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... with bodies bronzed and bare, High-swoln and hard, outlive that lack of care - Forced on some farm, the unexerted strength, Though loth to action, is compell'd at length, When warm'd by health, as serpents in the spring, Aside their slough of indolence they fling. Yet, ere they go, a greater evil comes - See! crowded beds in those contiguous rooms; Beds but ill parted, by a paltry screen Of paper'd lath, or curtain dropt between; Daughters and ...
— The Parish Register • George Crabbe
... no longing was ever more firmly planted in the human heart, than that of discovering some short cut to the high road of mental acquirement. The toilsome learner's "Progress" through the barren outset of the alphabet; the slough of despond of seven syllables, endangered as they both are by the frequent appearance of the compulsive birch of the Mr. Worldly-wisemen who teach the young idea how to shoot, must ever be looked upon as a probation, the power of avoiding which is "a consummation devoutly to be wished." ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 20, 1841 • Various
... the fields, Furious from thirst and by the drought dismayed. Me list not then beneath the open heaven To snatch soft slumber, nor on forest-ridge Lie stretched along the grass, when, slipped his slough, To glittering youth transformed he winds his spires, And eggs or younglings leaving in his lair, Towers sunward, lightening with three-forked tongue. Of sickness, too, the causes and the signs I'll teach thee. Loathly scab assails the sheep, When chilly showers have ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... facts. We have heard of a little child who so simply trusted Christ for salvation that she could give no account of any 'law work.' And as one of the old examiners, who thought there could be no genuine conversion without a period of deep conviction, asked her, "But, my dear, how about the Slough of Despond?" she dropped a courtesy and said, "Please, sir, I ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... and wonderfully little—the Slough of Despond, Doubting Castle, the Valley of the Shadow of Death—they all fall into place. Ah! the modern Pilgrim's Progress would read strangely and significantly with woman as the pilgrim! But the end—that ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... as old as the first man who threw away his shield in battle, and yet, when it was over, gathered with the victors to share the spoils, as old as cowardice and lust in the human and animal world; only to cease from being when, perhaps, an enlarged and expanded humanity shall have cast the last slough of ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... accounted for by the fact that Davoust had found a marsh without a bridge, and completely encumbered with wagons. He had dragged them out of the slough in sight of the enemy, and so near them that their fires lighted his labors, and the sound of their drums mingled with that of his own voice. For the marshal and his generals could not yet resolve on abandoning to the enemy so many trophies; nor did they make up their minds to it until after fruitless ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... human beings sink to the depths in which John B. Gough found himself at the age of twenty-five years. By sheer force of will he raised himself from the slough in which he wallowed, till he attained a position honored among men, and performed a service of exceptional usefulness ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... kicked in disgrace from his noble and well-disciplined mind. He resolved, that, let it cost what it might in the shape of loss of time and trial of temper, he would leave no stone unturned, and spare no pains, to deliver his friend of yesterday from the slough into which he was plunging. How he might best work for this end occupied his thoughts as he ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... therefore, who depends upon the opinion of others, is compelled to assume the appearance of being comfortably circumstanced in order to inspire confidence. Character is the life-blood of Englishmen, but character alone will seldom extricate a man from the slough of Poverty. In our highly artificial state of society, something more powerful than character alone is required to place a man in the road to fortune — call it as you please, tact ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... long, stout cane, plunged into the slough. He was more anxious than he was willing to say, but at the same time he was hopeful. As the swamp was due, at least in large part, to the great rains, it must have firm ground somewhere, and he had noticed also in the thickening twilight that the bushes ahead seemed much larger ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... telegraphy and posthumous photography. Meantime an unctuous orthoepist applied a homeopathic restorative to the retina of an objurgatory spaniel (named Daniel) and tried to perfect the construction of a behemoth which had got mired in pygmean slough, while listening to the elegiac soughing ...
— 1001 Questions and Answers on Orthography and Reading • B. A. Hathaway
... pouring rain, for the next few days, washing the walls of snow down the unmetaled streets, a very slough of despond to all beasts of burden. Once more the sight of green grass relieved the eye, weary of the one monotonous hue it had rested on for weeks, and still it rained as if determined not to stop till it had fulfilled its mission, ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... obedience. He was necessarily a man of quick perception, always fertile in expedients in times of emergency, and something of an engineer; for to know how properly to cross a raging stream or a marshy slough with an outfit of fifty or sixty wagons required more than ordinary intelligence. Then in the case of a stampede, great clear-headedness and coolness were needed ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... memory for medical terms. Yes, he saw Carre's slough. He himself has the like on his posterior and on his heel; but the tear that trembles in the corner of his eye ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... a war! Let not the mad anger of such a people be aroused. And, gentlemen, if war comes it must be long and terrible. You will see both parties rise in their majesty at both ends of the line. They will slough off every other consideration and devote themselves, with terrible energy, to the work of death. Oh ye! who bring such a calamity as this upon this once happy country! Pause, gentlemen, before you do it, and think of the fearful accountability that awaits ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... never get into any proper relation to Jimville unless you could slough off and swallow your acquired prejudices as a lizard does his skin. Once wanting some womanly attentions, the stage-driver assured me I might have them at the Nine-Mile House from the lady barkeeper. The phrase tickled ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... city he found it situated in a slough. It was generally supposed that the ground upon which the city was built was a natural swamp, and when Palmer, among others, advocated the idea of raising the streets they were ridiculed. But subsequent tests proved that beneath the surface ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... not be immediately choked up by the ooze of the morass and the luxuriant parasitical growth of the forest—who dare hope for that? At present, alas, it would seem as though no one dares even to hope! It is the great Slough of ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... of knocking some over, when the rest soon jumped off. However, F—- and myself declared we would go right into the quadrangle of the Castle, so we went into the middle of the road and formed a line. Soon a rocket (the signal that the Queen was at Slough) was let off, and then some Life Guards came galloping along, and one of them ran almost over me, and actually trod on F—-'s toe, which put him into dreadful pain for some time. Then came the Queen's carriage, and I thought college would have tumbled down with the ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... try to be "careful and not captious," as you suggest, but more than all, I shall try not to run myself or my cause into the slough of political schemes or schemers. And I pray you, be prudent and conscientious, and do not surrender one iota of true principle or of our philosophy of reform to ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... Straits, and Mare Island, thirty square miles; the area of Suisun Bay, to the confluence of the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers, is sixty-three square miles. The total bay area is therefore four hundred and eighty square miles; and there are hundreds of miles of slough, river, and creek. A yachtsman, starting from Alviso, at the southern end of the bay, may sail in one general direction one hundred and fifty-four miles to Sacramento, before turning. All of this, ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... we emerged from the slough, and about daylight on the third morning were rumbled over the pave ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... a child of five years old, whose rambles led him into a hundred awkward situations. Twice was the Dominie chased by a cross-grained cow, once he fell into the brook crossing at the stepping-stones, and another time was bogged up to the middle in the slough of Lochend, in attempting to gather a water-lily for the young Laird. It was the opinion of the village matrons who relieved Sampson on the latter occasion, 'that the Laird might as weel trust the care o' his bairn to ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... our feet, and the drip, drip of water was incessant. "We are under the river-bed," said Moore, "in a kind of natural Thames Tunnel." We made what speed we might through this combination of the Valley of the Shadow with the Slough of Despond, and soon were on firmer ground again beneath Moore's own territory. Probably no other white men had ever crawled through the hidden passage and gained the further penetralia of the cave, which now again began to narrow. Finally we reached four tall pillars, of about ten feet in ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... all I saw was from a curtained auto as we swayed and bumped over broken roads, with an occasional interlude when Jeremy and I got out to lend our shoulders and help the Arab driver heave the car out of a slough. ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... To educate men into self-government—that is the purpose of the government of God; and some of the men of the eighteenth century did not learn that lesson. As the century rolled on, the human mind arose out of the slough in which Le Sage found it, into manifold and beautiful activity, increasing hatred of shams and lies, increasing hunger after truth and usefulness. With mistakes and confusions innumerable they worked: but still they worked; ...
— The Ancien Regime • Charles Kingsley
... orators perambulate the country to preach a boycott of British officials, the Mahars should have sent in petitions imploring the Governor not to abandon them or surrender the power which has alone done something to raise them out of the slough of despond? Mr. Gandhi, however, who would be a great social reformer had he not preferred to plunge into a dangerous political agitation, is not himself blind to such an awful blot as "untouchability" has made on Hindu civilisation, and some of his followers, prompted ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... of this species of Snipe was found situated in a slight depression at the base of a small hillock near the border of a prairie slough near Evanston, Illinois, and was made of grass stems and blades. The color of the eggs in this instance was a deep grayish white, three of which were marked with spots of dark brown, and the fourth egg with spots and ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [August, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... which, left to themselves, never received from without any spiritual and religious instruction, could never rise from the slough of sensuality and superstition; they sank deep in idolatry, and ultimately adopted creeds and practices abominable and repugnant alike to the excellence of reason and the dignity of man. On the other hand, all the nations that totally or partly succeeded in extricating themselves from ...
— A Guide for the Religious Instruction of Jewish Youth • Isaac Samuele Reggio
... of Herefordshire, Isle of Wight, City of Kingston upon Hull, Leicester, Luton, Medway, Middlesbrough, Milton Keynes, North East Lincolnshire, North Lincolnshire, North Somerset, Nottingham, Peterborough, Plymouth, Poole, Portsmouth, Reading, Redcar and Cleveland, Rutland, Slough, South Gloucestershire, Southampton, Southend-on-Sea, Stockton-on-Tees, Stoke-on-Trent, Swindon, Telford and Wrekin, Thurrock, Torbay, Warrington, West Berkshire, Windsor and Maidenhead, Wokingham, York Northern Ireland: 26 district council areas district council areas: ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... fling," or "driven to the bad," because once an individual feels he is responsible to himself for undue physical indulgences—for laws of natural life set at naught, and spiritual impulses disregarded—he will try to emerge from the slough of evil, and he will learn with startling rapidity to value all joys of the senses less and less. There can be no high order of morality without this sense of responsibility, for when a man feels he is moulding his own character, forming, as it were, fresh links in the chain ...
— The Mystery of a Turkish Bath • E.M. Gollan (AKA Rita)
... fashion in which the British Navy lived up to its best traditions in that Battle of Jutland, it seems nothing short of criminal that the English censor should have permitted the world to hold Great Britain in contempt for twenty-four hours and sink poor France in the slough of despond. However, he is used to abuse, and ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... standards, for in a fourteen-hour working day John Cardigan and his men could not cut more than twenty thousand feet of lumber. Nevertheless, when Cardigan looked at his mill, his great heart would swell with pride. Built on tidewater and at the mouth of a large slough in the waters of which he stored the logs his woods-crew cut and peeled for the bull- whackers to haul with ox-teams down a mile-long skid-road, vessels could come to Cardigan's mill dock to load and lie safely in twenty feet of water at low tide. Also this dock was sufficiently ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... Even then, a vague forewarning of what Mannion's inexplicable reserve boded towards me, crossed my mind. There was yet more difficulty, danger, and horror to be faced, than I had hitherto confronted. The slough of degradation and misery into which I had fallen, had its worst perils yet in store ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... disgrace, and the wages of work were plentiful. To live without work was the lot of none. What blessing above these blessings was needed to make a people great and happy? And now a stranger visiting them would declare that they are wallowing in a very slough of despond. The only trade open is the trade of war. The axe of the woodsman is at rest; the plow is idle; the artificer has closed his shop. The roar of the foundery is still heard because cannon ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... proper moment, gave orders to fire upon the advancing enemy. The volley checked them, although they returned the compliment, and shot one of our party through the leg. Frank McCarthy then sang out, “Boys, make a break for the slough yonder, and we can have the bank for ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... whatever I found" so he wrapped it up in leaves and took it home; and his daughter-in-law told him that he had done well and bade him hang up the packet at the back of the house. A few days later he found the slough of a snake and he took that home and his daughter-in-law told to tie a clod of earth to it to prevent its being blown away, and to throw it on to the roof ...
— Folklore of the Santal Parganas • Cecil Henry Bompas
... comely and the most honorable part. They cannot benefit their children by descending from their Heaven-appointed places, and becoming perpetual and exclusive feet and hands. This is the great fault of American mothers. They swamp themselves in a slough of self-sacrifice. They are smothered in their own sweetness. They dash into domesticity with an impetus and abandonment that annihilate themselves. They sink into their families like a light in a poisonous well, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... would have told a sorry tale; For whether it be wine, or it be ale, That he hath drank, he speaketh through the nose, And sneezeth much, and he hath got the POSE, {19} And also hath given us business enow To keep him on his horse, out of the slough; He'll fall again, if he be driven to speak, And then, where are we, for a second week? Why, lifting up his heavy drunken corse! Tell on thy tale, and look we to his horse. Yet, Manciple, in faith thou art too nice Thus openly to chafe him for his vice. ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... defeat yet," were his words when he spoke at last. She listened, still on her knees: "It is a common thing to say that suspense is worse to bear than certainty, but the certainty that destroys hope and makes the future a blank is very like a millstone hanged round a man's neck to sink him in a slough of despondency. I never really believed it until Dr. Courteney told me that if I wish to save my life it must be at the cost of my ambition; that I can never be an advocate, a teacher, a preacher; that I shall have to go softly ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... scald, a poet. mall, a mallet. sew'er (so'er), one who sews. slough (sluf), a snake's skin. sew'er (su'er), a drain. slough, a miry place. court'e sy, civility. wear, a dam in a river. courte'sy, a slight bow. wear, waste. slav'er, a slave ship. min'ute (min'it), sixty seconds. slav'er, spittle. mi nute', very ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... What is this? for Saint James!—I may not well gang. I trust I be the same. Ah! my neck has lain wrang Enough Mickle thank, since yester-even Now, by Saint Stephen! I was flayed with a sweven,—[140] My heart out of slough.[141] I thought Gill began to croak, and travail full sad, Well nigh at the first cock,—of a young lad, For to mend our flock: then be I never glad. To have two on my rock,—more than ever I had. ...
— Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction • Anonymous
... on me under the name A.Z., and I will understand. Your financial affairs are in desperate condition but the case is not hopeless. You are young and healthy but you lack a definite plan of life. If someone will throw you a line while you are floundering in this slough you will come out all right. Now what's this thing you are to do after the ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... (Lord Southend spoke a little lower), "she went straight from the Duchess of Slough's ball to the station, as she was, in a low gown and a scarlet opera cloak—met Edge, whose wife had only been dead three months—and went off with him. You know the rest of the story. It was a near run for young Harry Tristram! How is the ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... wretched slough of helplessness, Dorothy found her conviction wavering. Could it really be possible that he was speaking the truth; that he did not know? But with the dreadful thought came also the realization that she must not let him fathom her mind. She told herself that she must keep ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... feel in the ink of the slough, And the sink of the mire, Veins of glory and fire Run through and transpierce and transpire, And a secret purpose of glory in every part, And the answering glory of battle fill my heart; To thrill with the joy of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... entered the city he found it situated in a slough. It was generally supposed that the ground upon which the city was built was a natural swamp, and when Palmer, among others, advocated the idea of raising the streets they were ridiculed. But subsequent tests proved that beneath the surface there was a solid rock bottom, therefore it ...
— Hidden Treasures - Why Some Succeed While Others Fail • Harry A. Lewis
... and the fat gentleman found much to interest them as the coach rolled over the smooth prairie road, now and then crossing a slough. Not that Mr. Minorkey or his fat friend had any particular interest in the beautiful outline of the grassy knolls, the gracefulness of the water-willows that grew along the river edge, and whose paler green was the prominent feature of ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... not repel the past or what it has produced under its forms or amid other politics or the idea of castes or the old religions ... accepts the lesson with calmness ... is not so impatient as has been supposed that the slough still sticks to opinions and manners and literature while the life which served its requirements has passed into the new life of the new forms ... perceives that the corpse is slowly borne from the eating and sleeping rooms of the house ... perceives that it waits a little while ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... think sometimes, as I shall think always, that we might have lived innocently and happily in New England, forgetting and forgotten by the rabble we left behind us, having shaken off the slough of an unhappy life, beginning the world again, under new names, in a new climate and country. It was a guilty dream to entertain, perhaps; but I shall dream it often enough in a strange land, among strange faces and strange ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... I jined Colonel Baker's Gang, we wuz comin' frum Fulton to Clipper through de Red River bottoms. De river wuz overflowin' an' as we wuz crossin' a deep, swift slough, Colonel Baker and his horse got tangled up in some grape vines. Colonel Baker yelled, and I turned my mule around and cut all de grape vine loose wid my Bowie knife. Dere ain't nothin' like a mule for swimmin'. Dey can swim circles aroun' any horse. ...
— Slave Narratives: Arkansas Narratives - Arkansas Narratives, Part 6 • Works Projects Administration
... and the outlying guards reported bands of savages skulking about in considerable numbers. "About ten o'clock at night," says Major Denny, "General Butler, who commanded the right wing, was desired to send out an intelligent officer and party to make discoveries. Captain Slough, with two subalterns and thirty men, I saw parade at General Butler's tent for this purpose, and heard the general give Captain Slough very particular verbal orders how to proceed." Slough afterwards testified before a committee of Congress, that he was sent ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... and here and there up to their knees. More than once Jack could not help fearing that his guide had made a mistake, and that he was leading him into dangerous country; but he did not wish to show any suspicion of his judgment, and made no remark. Again the horses rose up out of the slough across which they had been wading and enjoyed for a short time some hard ground; but they soon had to leave it, to wade on as before. On every side was heard the loud croaking of frogs; their heads poked up in all the shallower marshes, with the object, it seemed, of ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... down hill, through slough and over rock, we trudged, for mile after mile. Sometimes beside Get-Along Lake, with its grey, spectral islands and woodlands; sometimes by rushing brooks and dreary farm-fields; now in paths close set with evergreens; now in more open grounds, skirted with hills and dotted with silent, ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... taking them, naturally enough, as signs of continued remorse, lifted her out of this supposed slough of despond with affectionate peremptoriness. "Don't feel so badly about it, darling. We won't have any more talk for the present about differing judgments, or of going away, or of anything uncomfortable"; and in this way, with ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... that the Science of Morals can never be as exact as that of Mathematics, because we have no terminology for Ethics so exact as for Geometry, she, in effect, yields the whole question, and leaves us in the old slough of doubt where Pyrrho and Pascal delighted to thrust us, and where the Church threatens to keep us, unless we will pay her tolls and pick our way along her turnpike. But though her major and minor premises may not be on the best terms with each other,—even ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... that such men and women are the salt of the earth, who keep society from rotting; that by such men and women, and by their example and influence, direct and indirect, has Christendom been raised up out of the accursed slough into which Europe and, indeed, the whole known world, had fallen during the early Roman Empire; and that to this influence, and therefore to the Holy Spirit of God alone, and not to any prudential calculations, combined ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... Personally I have had to learn slowly, "line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little, there a little." And I would caution my readers not to expect too much all at once. But I am fully convinced that as faith, trust, and naturalness grow, worry will cease, will slough off, like the dead skin of the serpent, and leave those once bound by it free from its malign influence. Who cannot see and feel that such a consummation is devoutly to be wished, worth ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... moist and not wet land that the strawberry requires. If water stands or stagnates upon or a little below the surface, the soil becomes sour, heavy, lifeless; and if clay is present, it will bake like pottery in dry weather, and suggest the Slough of Despond in wet. Disappointment, failure, and miasma are the certain products of such unregenerate regions, but, as is often the case with repressed and troublesome people, the evil traits of such soil result from a lack of balance, and a ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... a young baron!—Well, but cheer you up, Mistress Margaret—If he has come up a caterpillar, like some of his countrymen, he may cast his slough like them, and come out a butterfly.—So I drink good-night, and sweet dreams to you, in another parting cup of sack; and you shall hear tidings of me within four-and- twenty hours. And, once more, I commend ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... the straw-bale, and it gave him a momentary, a precarious footing. He could not regain his balance, he could not even for an instant stand upright on it. But from its support he leapt on convulsively, and, as a pike, flung from above, wounded him in the shoulder, he fell his length in the slough—but forward, with his outstretched hands resting on soil of a harder nature. They sank, it is true, to the elbow, but he dragged his body forward on them, and forward, and freeing one by a last effort of strength—he could not free both, and, as it ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... the family. He found Mr. Young, the settler, exhausted. They both fought the fierce blaze, and when hope of saving the home was gone, the constable, plunging through the fire, found Mrs. Young and the children standing in the water of a slough. He saw that they would be suffocated when the fire encircled it, and so he plunged and carried the children to the burnt ground, the mother following. From the settler's grateful letter to headquarters we make this extract: "His pluck and endurance I cannot praise ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... worked along smoothly until Pliable and Christian, (I and Jake), fell into the Slough of Despond. You know, in the book, Pliable and Christian are traveling together; they fall in the Slough of Despond; Pliable struggles and gets out. Christian, owing to the burden he carries on his back, flounders about and is fast sinking when Help appears and asks: "What doest thou there?" ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... difficulties. The country about Melbourne, and far inland, was boggy, the soil being volcanic, and abounding in mud which appears to have no bottom. The road to the mines was all the worse for having been ploughed up by bullock teams, and worked into a slough which proved the discouragement of mining parties. Some were even months in traversing the comparatively small distance across the country to the goal they sought. But the attraction of money, which is said to make the mare go, enabled them to triumph at last ...
— In A New World - or, Among The Gold Fields Of Australia • Horatio Alger
... this is why some of the most characteristic of the artist's designs are to be found in his illustrations to the "Waverley Novels." In one of these he shows us the illustrious Dominie at the moment, when reaching over to gather a water-lily, he falls souse into the Slough of Lochend, in which he forthwith became bogged up to the middle, his plight drawing from him of course his favourite ejaculation of amazement. By the assistance of some women the luckless Dominie was extracted from his position, ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... of opinion, however, that, once there, this brother would find a difficulty in getting rid of him. He thought with longing of that clean and healthy life, the escape from the slough into which his feet would always wander while he remained here. The means to escape he now held ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... tradition of Dryden and Johnson and Macaulay and Leslie Stephen; he has an argumentative prose-style and a distaste for highfalutin, and, where the unenlightened intellectualism of Macaulay and Leslie Stephen, and the incorrigible common sense of Johnson, might have pitched these eminent men into the slough of desperate absurdity, it often happens that Mr. Brock, whose less powerful mind is sweetened by a sense of ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... and quarries, and fat soil and bounteous rivers; yet railroads have been the making of Illinois. Nobody who has ever seen her spring roads, where there are no rails, can ever question it. From the very fatness of her soil, the greater part of the State must have been one Slough of Despond for three quarters of the year, and her inhabitants strangers to each other, if these iron arms had not drawn the people together and bridged the gulfs for them. No roads but railroads could possibly have threaded ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... head on my heart, felt your cheek touch mine. Then and there I made a covenant with my soul; and no other man's arms shall ever enfold you. Ah, my Rosa Alba! I could dig your grave with my own hands, sooner than see that thief claim you. I am a proud man, and you have dragged me through the slough of humiliation, but to-day, as I bid you good-bye, I realize how one felt, who looking at the bust of him she loved supremely, said with her last breath: 'Voila mon univers, mon espoir, et mes dieux!' How soon we meet again depends ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... place, a certain amount of variety would be secured by the proposed method which under the existing system we miss. There is, of course, such a danger as that of providing too much liturgical variety. Amateur makers of Prayer Books almost invariably fall into this slough. Hymn-books, as is well known, often destroy their own usefulness by including too many hymns; and Prayer Books may do the same ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... and suffered for ideas, for principles, for abstractions. Powerful influences have been exerted, from the highest quarters, to bring her into subjection to material interests and unheroic maxims, to sap the chivalry and enthusiasm of her youth. But it is not too late, Let her slough this all off in her hour of trial! Let her cast off her disguises and her rags together, and stand forth in the garb and attitude of a hero! This work must be done. If the men of scholarship and accomplishments and ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... done there will be very few stones showing when the forms are removed. When stiff pastes or mortars are used the contractor often places the facing by plastering the lagging just ahead of the concreting; this process requires constant watching to see that the plaster coat does not slough or peel off before it is ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... most beautiful location and its people were very ambitious. In fruitless effort to sustain its lead, the town had built a pier almost two miles in length to a slough navigable to ocean steamers. A single horse drew a flat car carrying passengers and freight. It was the nearest approach to a railroad in the state of California at the time of our arrival on that lovely morning ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... his own way;" but such a thought was soon kicked in disgrace from his noble and well-disciplined mind. He resolved, that, let it cost what it might in the shape of loss of time and trial of temper, he would leave no stone unturned, and spare no pains, to deliver his friend of yesterday from the slough into which he was plunging. How he might best work for this end occupied his thoughts as he ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... precious to one who knew that he had still a life-work to accomplish. He at one stroke freed himself from all distractions; his pupils and concerts, his whole connection at Bath, were immediately renounced; he accepted the King's offer with alacrity, and after one or two changes settled permanently at Slough, ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... have charms, especially when they are old and picturesque, and smell of the Middle Ages; but to be kept a prisoner in one of them by rainy weather is apt to plunge a restless wanderer into the Slough of Despond. The chances are that the inn itself becomes at such times a slough, so that Bunyan's expression is then applicable in a real as well as in a figurative sense. There is a constant coming in and going out of peasants with ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... free-thinking, knowing nothing of the deep yearnings any more than of the supreme wretchlessness of the human soul, which it kept imprisoned within the narrow limits of earth and time. At the outcome from the bloody slough of the French Revolution and from the chaos it caused in men's souls, it was the infidelity of Voltaire which remained at the bottom of the scepticism and moral disorder of the France of our day. The demon which torments her is ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... here!" she had sometimes sighed to herself;—but in all these days she wrote him no word. And he—guessing nothing of her long, silent agony, himself sufficiently bemired in his slough of despond, working away with sad, unsatisfied heart in his little studio, hoping yet for light to come to his night—was, in truth, so full of himself, that Hepsy Ann had little of his thoughts. Shall I go farther, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... his windows, and making us repeat them after him, to see if we had got them right. They were Gull Pond, (the largest and a very handsome one, clear and deep, and more than a mile in circumference,) Newcomb's, Swett's, Slough, Horse-Leech, Round, and Herring Ponds,—all connected at high-water, if I do not mistake. The coast-surveyors had come to him for their names, and he told them of one which they had not detected. He said that they were not so high as formerly. There was an earthquake about four ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... recent date, from eighteen inches to two feet in thickness, which may have been washed in, and likewise turned on by plowing. A farmer who had worked the land, told me that he had "back furrowed" around it, for the purpose of filling up the slough ...
— The American Goliah • Anon.
... fill satisfactorily even the meanest situations in a well-ordered English household. Their resource is to take service with people only a step or two above the poorest class, with whom they fare scantily, endure harsh treatment, lead shifting and precarious lives, and finally drop into the slough of evil, through which, in their best estate, they do but pick their slimy way ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... I'd have more money, I s'pose. Perhaps you've noticed that those who trust a good deal are usually poor. It's all right, Mr. Ellery; you go and take your walk. And I'll walk into that pantry closet. It'll be a good deal like walkin' into the Slough of Despond, but Christian came out on the other side and I guess likely I will, if the supply of ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... fine, clear morning when we started for Windsor by railroad, a distance of twenty-one miles. The country is fine; but our thoughts were on the castle. At Slough we took an omnibus, and rode into the town. It is a pretty, quiet place, of about ten thousand inhabitants. There are some six or seven streets, and they present but few attractions. The castle is every thing. You know this has been the favorite residence of most of the English ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... days until the holidays. This year the weather remained warm and the storm was later than usual, but more severe when it did come, driving thousands of water-fowl down with a rush from the mountain streams and lakes. There is a slough around a little plateau near the post, and for a week or more this was teeming with all kinds of ducks, until it was frozen over. Sometimes we would see several species quietly feeding together in the most friendly way. Faye and I would drive the horses down in the cutter, ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... military service, their demand for the right of voting was so far justified, as the right of voting and the obligation of service had always gone hand in hand. Moreover, looking to the nullity of the comitia, it was politically of very little moment whether one sewer more emptied itself into that slough. The difficulty which the oligarchy felt in governing with the comitia was lessened rather than increased by the unlimited admission of the freedmen, who were to a very great extent personally and financially ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... in daily act, but living yet in spirit, and influencing the commonplace facts to which they have yielded the field, permeating the everyday routine with the ennobling power of lofty desires, and keeping the wayworn traveller from sinking into the slough of materialism or the quicksands of utter weariness. The man who in his youth dreamed of elevating his kind by a noble employment of the gifts of genius, may find that genius apparently useless, a hindrance even ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... board his lugger; but he, also continuing to get no fish, called out, 'Swear away, lads, and see what that'll do.' Perhaps he only meant as Menage's French Bishop did; who going one day to Court, his carriage stuck fast in a slough. The Coachman swore; the Bishop, putting his head out of the window, bid him not do that; the Coachman declared that unless he did, his horses would never get the carriage out of the mud. 'Well then, says the Bishop, ...
— Two Suffolk Friends • Francis Hindes Groome
... in this region of the Columbia was named Wappatoo Island by the explorers. This is a large extent of country lying between the Willamette and an arm of the Columbia which they called Wappatoo Inlet, but which is now known as Willamette Slough. It is twenty miles long and from five to ten miles wide. Here is an interesting description of the manner of gathering the roots of the wappatoo, of which we have heard so much in ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... Tuscany sank lower and lower in the slough. To please the Pope, havoc was made of the Leopoldine laws—named after the son of Maria Theresa, the wise Grand Duke Leopold I.—laws by which a bridle was put on the power and extension of the Church. The prosecution and imprisonment of a Protestant couple who were accused ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... Carriage springs up, with another bounce,—down go the hind wheels,—senator, woman, and child, fly over on to the back seat, his elbows encountering her bonnet, and both her feet being jammed into his hat, which flies off in the concussion. After a few moments the "slough" is passed, and the horses stop, panting;—the senator finds his hat, the woman straightens her bonnet and hushes her child, and they brace themselves for what ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... not far from the fire, each with a cover thrown over the saddle. Our three young companions helped put hobbles on the fore-legs of the horses, and soon all the horse band, twelve in number, were hopping away from the camp in search of grass and water. They found the latter in a little slough a short distance back on the trail, and did not attempt the ...
— The Young Alaskans in the Rockies • Emerson Hough
... his last chances of health and life to put down with a strong hand the robbers who infested the streets of London; and clinging with affection to his wife and children. He never got fairly clear of that lamentable slough of despond into which his follies had plunged him. His moral tone lost what delicacy it had once possessed; he had not the strength which enabled Johnson to gain elevation even from the temptations which then beset the unlucky 'author by profession.' ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... fire, and only fragments of them lay about the ground. Others had been wrecked but partially, with holes in the roofs and the windows shot out. The white pillars in front of colonnaded mansions had been shattered and the fallen columns lay in the icy slough. Long icicles hung from the burned portions of upper ...
— The Star of Gettysburg - A Story of Southern High Tide • Joseph A. Altsheler
... higher nature may be compelled to grovel, to wallow in the mire of sensual indulgence, but it always rebels and enters its protest. It can never forget that it bears the image of its Maker, even when dragged through the slough of sensualism. The still small voice which bids man look up is never quite hushed. If the victim of the lower nature could only forget that he was born to look upward, if he could only erase the image of his Maker, if he could only hush the voice which haunts him and condemns him when he is ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... atheist, how valuable an interpolation that would have been! What was it that made this man to set out so long ago for the Celestial City? What was it that so stoutly determined him to leave off all his old companions and turn his back on the sweet refreshments of his youth? How did he do at the Slough of Despond? Did he come that way? What about the Wicket Gate, and the House Beautiful, and the Interpreter's House, and the Delectable Mountains? What men, and especially what women, did he meet and converse with on his way? What ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... life my recreation, walking along the right road of proper means, my city of refuge in right recollection, and my sleeping couch right meditation; these are the eight even and level roads by which to avoid the sorrows of birth and death. Those who come forth by these means from the slough, doing thus, have attained the end; such shall fall neither on this side or the other, amidst the sorrow-crowd of the two periods. The tangled sorrow-web of the three worlds by this road alone can be destroyed; this is my own way, unheard of before; by the pure eyes of ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... Jerry Juniper; not, however, the Jerry of the gipsies, but a much more showy-looking personage. Jerry was no longer a gentleman of "three outs"—the difficulty would now have been to say what he was "without." Snakelike he had cast his slough, and rejoiced in new and brilliant investiture. His were "speaking garments, speaking pockets too." His linen was of the finest, his hose of the smartest. Gay rings glittered on his fingers; a crystal snuff-box underwent graceful manipulation; a handsome gold repeater was sometimes drawn from ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... of antiquity, which, left to themselves, never received from without any spiritual and religious instruction, could never rise from the slough of sensuality and superstition; they sank deep in idolatry, and ultimately adopted creeds and practices abominable and repugnant alike to the excellence of reason and the dignity of man. On the other hand, all the nations that totally or ...
— A Guide for the Religious Instruction of Jewish Youth • Isaac Samuele Reggio
... route was ta'en, Full well the paths I knew. Fame of my fate made various sound, That death in pilgrimage I found, That I had perished of my wound - None cared which tale was true: And living eye could never guess De Wilton in his palmer's dress; For now that sable slough is shed, And trimmed my shaggy beard and head, I scarcely know me in the glass. A chance most wondrous did provide That I should be that baron's guide - I will not name his name! - Vengeance to God alone belongs; But when I think on all my wrongs, My blood ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... well wonder where a Galilean fisherman got the impulse that lifted him to such a height; one may well wonder that he ventured to address such wide, absolute commandments to the handful of people just dragged from the very slough and filth of heathenism to whom he spoke. But he had dwelt with Christ, and they had Christ in their hearts. So for him to command and for them to obey, and to aim after even so wide and wonderful an attainment as perfecting like God's was the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... with wood-ashes) "and a tub full of fresh milk, and as many whips as a boy can carry in his arms,—and have all these brought into your bed-chamber. Then, when the Lindworm tells you to shed a shift, do you bid him slough a skin. And when all his skins are off, you must dip the whips in the lye and whip him; next, you must wash him in the fresh milk; and, lastly, you must take him and hold him in your arms, if it's ...
— East of the Sun and West of the Moon - Old Tales from the North • Peter Christen Asbjornsen
... desiring to achieve thy evil. Then loud cries of 'Oh' and 'Alas' arose among thy sons, O king, upon beholding that terrible dart resembling the rod of Death in splendour. And hurled from Sweta's arms, (that dart), resembling a snake that had just cast off its slough, fell with great force, O king, like a large meteor from the firmament. Thy sire Devavrata then, O king, without the slightest fear, with eight sharp and winged arrows, cut off into nine fragments, that dart decked with pure gold and which seemed to be covered with ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... intelligible to any child, and further, it is highly dramatic and picturesque. It is, to be sure, an allegory, but one of those allegories which seem inherent in the human mind and hence more natural than the most direct narrative. For all men life is indeed a journey, and the Slough of Despond, Doubting Castle, Vanity Fair, and the Valley of Humiliation are places where in one sense or another every human soul has often struggled and suffered; so that every reader goes hand in hand with Christian and his friends, fears ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... Sept. 21, just two weeks after the robbery, Oscar saw us, and fled into town with the alarm. A party of forty was soon out in search for us, headed by Capt. W. W. Murphy, Col. Vought and Sheriff Glispin. They came up with us as we were fording a small slough, and unable to ford it with their horses, they were delayed somewhat by having to go around it. But they soon after got close enough so that one of them broke my walking stick with a shot. We were in sight of our long-sought horses when they cut us off from the animals, and our last hope was ...
— The Story of Cole Younger, by Himself • Cole Younger
... and to lend a hand in the writing of a few playlets. Becoming convinced of the irresponsible mendacity of the dramatic profession, I gave up the stage, too, vowing never to write except on commission, and sank entirely into the slough of journalism (glad enough to get there), inter alia editing a comic paper (not Grimaldi, but Ariel) with a heavy heart. At last the long apathy wore off, and I resolved to cultivate literature again in my scraps of time. It is a mere accident that I ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III., July 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... has no comfort at home. He becomes crabbed, morose, and querulous, losing all pleasure in life. He wants the passport to enjoyment and respect—money; he has only his debts, and these make him suspected, despised, and snubbed. He lives in the slough of despond. He feels degraded in others' eyes as well as in his own. He must submit to impertinent demands, which he can only put off by sham excuses. He has ceased to be his own master, and has lost the independent bearing of a man. He seeks to excite pity, and pleads ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles
... Progress from his memories of the pilgrims and their fairs on the Way, he may have had other scenes in his mind which suggested other names. The Delectable Mountains may have been the blue line of the Sussex Downs, or the hills by Black Down and Hindhead. The Slough of Despond may have been the marshy pools of Shalford Common, or the ponds under the hill by Chilworth; and Doubting Castle, spelt Dowding Castle, is actually a name to be found on the Surrey map, south of Epsom Downs on Banstead Heath. But ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... reasons for so doing, certain it is that about noon I had ventured out; and equally so that some two hours after I had good reasons to regret my presumption, for at three, having already wandered far from home, I found myself tramping on the road I have named, wearily plodding my way through a slough of thawing snow, teeth chattering, eyes watering and fingers numbed, whilst a wind fit to dethrone all the weather-cocks in Christendom was ploughing up the earth in showers of mud around me, blowing my hat off my head and howling ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... was done with! His mother's death—that wanton stupidity on the part of fate—and the shock it had somehow caused him, had first drawn him out of the slough of a cheap and facile pleasure on which he now looked back with contempt. Afterwards, his two years of travel, and the joys at once virile and pure they had brought with them, joys of adventure, bodily endurance, discovery, together with the intellectual stimulus which comes of perpetual ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... you is the unerring judge, seems best, and be careless about the whimsies of such a half-baked notionist as I am. We are here in a most pleasant country, full of walks, and idle to our hearts desire. Taylor has dropt the London. It was indeed a dead weight. It has got in the Slough of Despond. I shuffle off my part of the pack, and stand like Xtian with light and merry shoulders. It had got silly, indecorous, pert, and every thing that is bad. Both our kind remembrances to Mrs. K. and yourself, and stranger's-greeting to Lucy—is it Lucy or Ruth?—that gathers ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... of flying iron, silent under the shock of news that his sight was gone for ever; the feeling that these men were suffering on our account, and the realisation that every one of us has had his share in the responsibility for the whole, makes a load that one cannot, or should not, slough away in a moment. ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... duke lost more. His mind was jaded. He floundered—he made desperate efforts, but plunged deeper in the slough. Feeling that, to regain his ground, each card must tell, he acted on each as if it must win, and the consequences of this insanity (for a gamester at such a crisis is really insane) were, that his losses ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... feebly quivering; a fish arises, and it is gone. Lower down the stream, I can see over a knoll the green and damp turf roofs of four or five hovels, built at the edge of a morass, which is trodden by the cattle into a black Slough of Despond at their doors, and traversed by a few ill-set stepping stones, with here and there a flat slab on the tops, where they have sunk out of sight;—and at the turn of the brook I see a man fishing, with a boy ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear. In the woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life is always a child. In the woods is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years.... It is the uniform ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... but to my best belief 'Twas almost anything but brief— A wide survey, in which the earth Was seen before mankind had birth; Strange monsters basked them in the sun, Behemoth, armored glyptodon, And in the dawn's unpractised ray The transient dodo winged its way; Then, by degrees, through silt and slough, We reached Berlin—I don't know how. The good Professor's monotone Had turned me into senseless stone Instanter, but that near me sat Hypatia in her new spring hat, Blue-eyed, intent, with lips whose bloom Lighted ...
— The Sisters' Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... declined over a long, gradual slope. At the bottom of it was a broad, almost dried-out slough. A wooden culvert spanned the reed-grown watercourse. Then the trail made a sharpish ascent beyond, and lost itself behind a distant bush, beyond which again stretched out a broad expanse ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... deg. and generally lasts to fifth and seventh day, at which time fever begins to diminish, with itching over the body. The skin at this time throws off all of the dead scales that had been red rash in the fore-part of the disease. Often the lining membranes of the mouth, throat and tonsils slough and bleed. Also pus is often formed just under the skin in front of the throat. Such ...
— Philosophy of Osteopathy • Andrew T. Still
... any proper relation to Jimville unless you could slough off and swallow your acquired prejudices as a lizard does his skin. Once wanting some womanly attentions, the stage-driver assured me I might have them at the Nine-Mile House from the lady barkeeper. ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... speak. That night the major, calling at Captain Dade's, was concerned to hear that Mrs. Dade was not at home. "Gone over to the hospital with Mrs. Blake and the doctor," was the explanation, and these gentle-hearted women, it seems, were striving to do something to rouse the lad from the slough of despond which had engulfed him. That night "Pink" Marble, Hay's faithful book-keeper and clerk for many a year, a one-armed veteran of the civil war, calling, as was his invariable custom when the ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... hearty roll of bassos from the kitchen, and did not doubt but that he was its target. He reined in his horse at the bare flower-beds and glowered back at the door. Then, with a mutter, ungrammatical but eloquent, he spurred on toward the lonely, supperless shack by the slough. ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... Marschner's "Templer und Jdin," Massenet's "Esclarmonde," Lalo's "Le Roi d'Ys," Goetz's "Taming of the Shrew," and Nicolai's "Merry Wives of Windsor." Not love of Wagner but fear of financial consequences dictated the step, which was successful in extricating the institution from the slough into which it had fallen. How much the Wagner operas and dramas did to keep the Metropolitan Opera House alive can be shown by the statistics of the last five German seasons, which I compiled at the close of the season of 1890-91, and printed in The Tribune of March ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... side; and over the brow of the hill, hurtling into sight, huge, unbelievably swift, roaring upon its whistle, tore a great, gray-painted motor lorry, packed with khaki-clad infantrymen. It was going at a hideous speed, leaping its tons of weight insanely from rock ridge to traffic-churned slough in the road; there was only time to note its immensity and uproar and the ranked faces of the men swaying in their places, and it was by, and another was bounding into sight behind it. A hundred and odd of them, each ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... abolished in 1847, Montem at Eton was a school holiday, an "event," as we should now say, of the London season. Of its origin nothing is known, but the ceremony of a procession in military costume "ad Montem" to a mound near Slough, now called Salt Hill, can be traced back to the sixteenth century. Visitors were offered salt by some of the boys, and in exchange gave money. The amount collected after payment of the expenses belonged to the captain of the school. —"History of Eton College," ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour. It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live, for my sight has been whetted by experience; always on the limits, trying to get into business and trying to get out of debt, a very ancient slough, called by the Latins aes alienum, another's brass, for some of their coins were made of brass; still living, and dying, and buried by this other's brass; always promising to pay, promising to pay, tomorrow, ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... results are due. It is strange, for instance, to find that the luck of the thirteen began right back at the time when Jan, motoring back from Uzhitze down the valley of the Morava, coming fastish round a corner, plumped right up to the axle in a slough of clinging wet sandy mud. The car almost shrugged its shoulders as it settled down, and would have said, if cars could speak, "Well, what are you going to do about that, eh?" It was about the 264th mud hole in which Jan's motor had stuck, ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... where the polygamous system prevails do we find a code of political and social ethics which recognizes the rights and claims of the individual. The condition of woman is that of the basest slave, a slave to the caprice and tyranny of her master. Communism raises her from the slough of slavery, but subjects her to the level of prostitution. An inevitable sequence of polygamy is a decline of literature and science. The natural tendency of each system is to sensualism., The blood is diverted from its normal channels and ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... has become sufficient to entirely arrest the circulation in any part, the structures soon die. The disorder manifests itself as lameness in one or more limbs; swelling about the ankle which may result in only a small slough or the loss of a toe, but it may circumscribe the limb at any point below the knee or hock by an indented ring below which the tissues become dead. The indentation soon changes to a crack, which extends completely around the limb, forming the line of separation between the dead and living ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... of the Administration had no selfish object. His heart was wrenched by the humiliation into which the honor of the United States had been dragged. The greatest patriotic service which he could render was to lift it out of that slough, and he did. The best evidence that he was right lies in the fact that President Wilson, tardily, reluctantly, adopted, one by one, Roosevelt's demands. He rejected Preparedness, when it could have been attained with comparative ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... steeped in milk: So, vague goldenness remote, Through my thoughts I watch thee float. When the snake summer casts her blazoned skin We find it at the turn of autumn's path, And think it summer that rewinded hath, Joying therein; And this enamouring slough of thee, mine elf, I take it for thyself; Content. Content? Yea, title it content. The very loves that belt thee must prevent My love, I know, with their legitimacy: As the metallic vapours, that are swept ...
— Sister Songs • Francis Thompson
... turns out. I've got your letters, and if you give me any pertness I'll send them to your father. I presume you grew weary of the amusement and dropped it, didn't you? Well, you dropped Linton with it into a Slough of Despond. He was in earnest: in love, really. As true as I live, he's dying for you; breaking his heart at your fickleness: not figuratively, but actually. Though Hareton has made him a standing ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... One vision of unseen things, rushing in, made small all the things that are seen. The poor old cripple, deformed and diseased, whose days must have been long a burden to her, was going even now to drop the slough of her mortality and to take on her the robes of light and the life that is all glory. What if my own life were barren for a while; then comes the end! What if I must be alone in my journey; I may do the Master's work ...
— Daisy in the Field • Elizabeth Wetherell
... odors, and vocal with the song of birds. Then the deep cypress-swamp, where dark trunks rise like the columns of some vast sepulchre. Above, the impervious canopy of leaves; beneath, a black and root-encumbered slough. Perpetual moisture trickles down the clammy bark, while trunk and limb, distorted with strange shapes of vegetable disease, wear in the gloom a semblance grotesque and startling. Lifeless forms lean propped in wild disorder against the living, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... limitation, suffering, sorrow, and even sin, play in the development of souls? Is it necessary that any should fall in order that they may rise? Did John Bunyan truly picture the ascent of the soul? Does its path, of necessity, lead through the Slough of Despond, through Vanity Fair, by Castle Dangerous, and into the realm ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... anything except snow, with the result that tents, wind clothes, night boots, &c., were all wet through; while water, dripping from the tent poles and door, lay on the floor, soaked the sleeping-bags, and made the situation inconceivably miserable. In the midst of this slough, however, Keohane had the spirit to make up a rhyme, which is worth quoting mainly, if not solely, because of the conditions under which ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... they say in Maine. And I admit that all I saw was from a curtained auto as we swayed and bumped over broken roads, with an occasional interlude when Jeremy and I got out to lend our shoulders and help the Arab driver heave the car out of a slough. ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... decided to be a suitable place to pass the night. "I mean not," he said, "that the place would please me were we out of the fen. But being in the fen, why, there be worse places than this to be found; for it is not a bog nor a slough, and there be reeds ...
— A Boy's Ride • Gulielma Zollinger
... "When shall this slough of sense be cast, This dust of thoughts be laid at last, The man of flesh and soul be slain And ...
— A Shropshire Lad • A. E. Housman
... the damp air blew chilly over the cold, glittering expanse, and came to the faces of those who looked seaward like another tide; when a steel-like glint marked the low hollows and the sinuous line of slough; when the great shell-incrusted trunks of fallen trees arose again, and went forth on their dreary, purposeless wanderings, drifting hither and thither, but getting no farther toward any goal at the falling tide or the day's decline than the ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... your account of him last year to me, he seemed a bit of a coxcomb, personally. Poor fellow! to be sure, he had had a long seasoning of adversity, which is not so hard to bear as t'other thing. I hope that this won't throw him back into the 'slough of Despond.' ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... obstinacy in error that even the little children, the sucking babes, were hardened and desperate heretics. He affirmed that no man without Heaven's especial warrant should attempt their conversion lest while he lent his hand to draw them from the slough he should himself be precipitated ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... after losing that history prize. She shrank from meeting the friends who had so confidently expected her to win it, and her own thoughts were too painful to be left alone with. If Hinpoha had been wandering in the Desert of Waiting for the past few months, Migwan was sunk deep in the Slough of Despond. She was at the age when death seemed preferable to defeat, and she wished miserably that she would fall ill of some mortal disease, and never have to face the world again with failure written on her forehead. ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at School • Hildegard G. Frey
... and fourth decades of our century, in other words, since the epoch of the Reform Bill and the Chartist agitation, satire has more and more tended to lose its acid and its venom, to slough the dark sardonic sarcasm of past days and to don the light sportive garb of the social humorist and epigrammist. Robustious bludgeoning has gone out of fashion, and in its place we have the playful satiric wit, sparkling as of well-drawn Moet or Clicquot, ...
— English Satires • Various
... power, no shameful neglect prevails in the departments of justice and police—it is hoped no reflecting reader will infer from this exposition of facts. But the still-existing abuses alter nothing in my view of the emperor's character, of his assiduous efforts to raise his nation out of the deep slough in which it still is partly sunk, of his efficacious endeavours to elevate his people to a knowledge and use of their rights as men—alter nothing in my profound persuasion that Czar Nicholas I. is the true father of ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... world was sinking in a slough Of sloth, and ease, and selfish greed; God surely sent this scourge to mould A ...
— 'All's Well!' • John Oxenham
... swept away forever, and ignorant what fate by fire or iron might be their portion ere the night was done. They saw the corn that was their winter store to save their offspring from famine poured out like ditch-water. They saw oats and wheat flung down to be trodden into a slough of mud and filth. They saw the walnut presses in their kitchens broken open, and their old heirlooms of silver, centuries old, borne away as booty. They saw the oak cupboard in their wives' bedchambers ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... lines. He always grasped the plan and intention, and really seemed to be inside the mind of the contriver. He would say; "I think the theme is weak here—and you can't make a weak place strong by filling it with details, however good in themselves. That is like trying to mend the Slough of Despond with cartloads of texts. The thing is not to fall in, or, if you fall in, to get out." His three divisions of a subject were "what you say, what you wanted to say, what you ought to have wanted to say." Sometimes he would listen in silence, and then say: "I can't criticise that—it ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... meant that the great numerical majority of the inhabitants bear this character, he spoke truly, inasmuch as the great numerical majority of the inhabitants are negroes, among the most depraved in the island. Kingston is like the slough of Despond, a place whither all the scum and filth of the negro population in the east end of the island do continually run, and make it a very sink of wickedness. But are the white families and the large number ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the up-looking of her better nature; and her charity was unbounded. Shall we—reared and instructed in all righteous ways—shall we show less charity to the memory of one who in her latter days rose out of the slough into which circumstance—not vice—had plunged her? Shall we be less charitable than the bishop who honored her memory and his own character by recording her benevolence, her penitence, her exemplary end? The good bishop's testimony renders it needless that we "point a moral." There ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... rolling across the mud, Trenches plastered with flesh and blood— The blue ranks lock with the ranks of gray, Stab and stagger and sob and sway; The living cringe from the shrapnel bursts, The dying moan of their burning thirsts, Moan and die in the gulping slough— Where are the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 29, 1917 • Various
... that I ought to wait, say a week at least having killed all your mules for you, before I shot down your dogs—but not being exactly Phoibos Apollon, you are to know further that when I did think I might go modestly on, ... [Greek: omoi], let me get out of this slough of a simile, never mind with what dislocation of ancles! Plainly, from waiting and turning my eyes away (not from you, but from you in your special capacity of being written-to, not spoken-to) when I turned ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... falls into the error (venial when he wrote) of assuming an etymological connexion between certain words which have a specious air of kinship—such as 'care' and 'cura,' 'bloom' and 'blossom,' 'ghastly' and 'ghostly,' 'brat' and 'brood,' 'slow' and 'slough'—he makes just the mistakes which we would be tempted to make ourselves had not Professor Skeat and Dr. Murray and the great German School of philologists taught us to know better. Our plan, therefore, has been to leave such errors in the text and point out ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... marcy we've gut folks to tell us The rights an' the wrongs o' these matters, I vow,— God sends country lawyers, an' other wise fellers, To start the world's team wen it gits in a slough; Fer John P. Robinson he Sez the world'll go right, ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... animal, supposed to be a cow, found two feet below the surface, in digging for the Great Western Railway, near Slough. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 18, 1841 • Various
... people should be drowned. I could only look into the imperturbable faces of our boatmen, and wonder where we were to spend the night. Finally, with a terrible whirl, which I felt at the time must be our last, they entered a white foaming slough (a branch of the river), and drew up on the bank. They announced to us then that we were to walk a mile through the woods, to a house. I think no white man, even the most surly of our drivers, would have asked us to do that,—in ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... existence is like the flight of a bird in the air; he is sustained only by effort, and when he ceases to exert himself he falls. There are intervals, however, of comparative calm, and to one of these the storm-tossed Bunyan was now approaching. He had passed through the Slough of Despond. He had gone astray after Mr. Legality, and the rocks had almost overwhelmed him. Evangelist now found him and put him right again, and he was to be allowed a breathing space at the Interpreter's ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... of the nation was again directed to Egypt the scene was transformed. It was as though at the touch of an angel the dark morasses of the Slough of Despond had been changed to the breezy slopes of the Delectable Mountains. The Khedive and his Ministers lay quiet and docile in the firm grasp of the Consul-General. The bankrupt State was spending surpluses upon internal ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... transparent of allegories. Unlike the Faery Queene, the story of Pilgrim's Progress has no reason for existing apart from its inner meaning, and yet its reality is so vivid that children read of Vanity Fair and the Slough of Despond and Doubting Castle and the Valley of the Shadow of Death with the same belief with which they read of ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... May in Ireland! What does it mean? It means coming out of a dark tunnel into blinding sunshine; it means casting off the slough of winter, and gliding with crest erect and fresh habiliments under leafy trees and by the borders of shining seas, the crab-apple blossoms, pink and white, scenting the air over your head, and primroses and violets dappling the turf beneath your feet; it means lambs frisking ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... and her mother spent in studying and discussing the latest fashion-plates, but the elaborate descriptions of expensive costumes plunged the girl into another state of bewilderment and slough of despond. She heartily regretted having accepted the invitation. She began to dread the party as an execution—to shrink from exhibiting herself to Christian with the fine ladies and gentlemen who would form the company at Mrs. Van Pelt's. However, the dress was cut and made, and in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... overdone with work, bereft of conjugal consolations, and weary of a world in which he wandered alone, by the time he was two-and-thirty had sunk into the Slough of Despond. He hated life. Having too lofty a notion of the responsibilities imposed on him by his position to set the example of a dissipated life, he tried to deaden feeling by hard study, and began a great book ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac
... tree in an Iowa slough! Yes, but more than that. This is the first sign of the resurrection which we call spring. When the pilgrims to the Eleusinian mysteries were ridiculed because of the commonplace nature of their symbols, they rightly replied that more than that which met the eye existed in ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... darkness was beginning to come on, we came to an almost impassable slough in the trail, where a small stream descended into a little flat marsh and morass. This had been used as a camping-place by others, and we decided to camp, because to travel, even in the twilight, was dangerous to life ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... certainly going to gain by the sale of the Slough works," said Mr. BONAR LAW last week. Whether to an extent that will justify the Government for having kept The Daily Mail waiting like that ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 21, 1920 • Various
... clover stack some hay should be used not easily penetrated by rain, as, for instance, blue grass obtained from fence corners, or slough hay obtained from marshes. The last-named is better put on green. If the clover is not thus protected, a considerable quantity will spoil on the top of the stacks. It is not a good hay to turn rain. ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw
... Paganini raised Berlioz from the slough of necessity so far that he could give his whole time to music. Instantly he set about his "Romeo and Juliet" symphony, which will always remain one of his masterpieces—a beautifully chiseled work, from the hands of one inspired by gratitude, unfettered imagination, ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... and international affairs, have increased greatly in the past decade. Consequently, the Government is larger than it was before the war, and its general operating costs are higher. We cannot shrink the Government to prewar dimensions unless we slough off these new responsibilities—and we cannot do that without paying an excessive price in terms of our national welfare. We can, however, enhance its operating efficiency through improved organization. I expect to make such improvements ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... bottom. Yellow Handkerchief took the tiller, issuing his orders in whispers; and from our position at the time, and from the alteration of the sail, which I could dimly make out above me as a blot against the stars, I knew the junk was being headed into the mouth of a small slough which emptied at that point ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... a few days after such a conversation the patient is down in the slough of despond. His digestive organs are in a wretched condition. He is nauseated, his tongue is coated, he is suffering from headache and from a multitude of other symptoms according to his individual condition. In fact, many of the ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... Darlington, Doncaster, Dudley, Gateshead, Halton, Hartlepool, Kirklees, Knowsley, Luton, Medway, Middlesbrough, Milton Keynes, North Tyneside, Oldham, Poole, Reading, Redcar and Cleveland, Rochdale, Rotherham, Sandwell, Sefton, Slough, Solihull, Southend-on-Sea, South Tyneside, St. Helens, Stockport, Stockton-on-Tees, Swindon, Tameside, Thurrock, Torbay, Trafford, Walsall, Warrington, Wigan, Wirral, Wolverhampton counties (or unitary authorities): Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... betrayed the cause for which he fought; he deserted the Southern people in the hour of need and joined their enemies. He was begged and implored not to persevere in his course, but he drifted on and on, and floundered deeper and deeper into the mire, until he landed fast in the slough where he sticks to-day. And what has he gained? Scorn, ostracism, odiurn, ill-will—worse than all, the contempt of the men who stood by him in the shower of death and destruction. Let Hesden Le Moyne take warning by ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... from the fire, each with a cover thrown over the saddle. Our three young companions helped put hobbles on the fore-legs of the horses, and soon all the horse band, twelve in number, were hopping away from the camp in search of grass and water. They found the latter in a little slough a short distance back on the trail, and did not attempt the steep descent ...
— The Young Alaskans in the Rockies • Emerson Hough
... whisky, with bloated face and trembling hand: alas, alas, ruined! Oh, do not give him up. Perhaps you can do something for him. Little kindness he has known for very long. Give him the five shillings by all means; but next morning see you go out, and try what may be done to lift him out of the slough of despond, and to give him a chance for better days! I know that it may be all in vain; and that after years gradually darkening down you may some day, as you pass the police-office, find a crowd at the door, and learn that they have got the corpse of the poor suicide ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... have been in, after the Crucifixion, when they said—'It is all up! we trusted that this had been He,' but the force of circumstances has shivered the confidence into fragments, and there is no such hope left for us any longer. What brought them out of that Slough of Despond? ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... half is slough, Half pine-tree forest: maples, scarlet oaks Breed o'er the river-beds; even Mincio chokes With sand the summer through: but 'tis morass In winter up to Mantua's walls. There was, Some thirty years before this evening's coil, One spot reclaimed from the surrounding ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... waters of the lake. We made the usual halt at the mouth of a small clear stream, having a slightly mineral taste, (perhaps of salt,) 4,760 feet above the gulf. In the afternoon we climbed a very steep sandy hill; and after a slow and winding day's march of 27 miles, encamped at a slough on the river. There were great quantities of geese and, ducks, of which only a few were shot; the Indians having probably made them very wild. The men employed themselves in fishing but caught nothing. A skunk, (mephitis Americana,) which was killed in the afternoon, ...
— The Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and California • Brevet Col. J.C. Fremont
... cross-shaped opening, the Anthrax suddenly appears, all moist with the humors of life's laboratory. She steadies herself upon her trembling legs, dries her wings and takes to flight, leaving at the window of the cell her nymphal slough, which keeps intact for a very long period. The sand-colored fly has five or six weeks before her, wherein to explore the clay nests amid the thyme and to take her small share of the joys of life. In July, we shall see her once more, busy this ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... not a little anxious. But their leader kept steadily on. The sand was hard enough and offered sufficient resistance to the broad hoof of a horse, but if one stood still for a minute or so, it began gradually to silt up and bury it. It was a horrible place. When at noon that devil's slough resolved itself into a comparatively narrow strip, and Dorothy saw that they could easily have left it, she began to understand their reason for keeping on such dangerous ground—they did not wish to leave any tracks behind them. In all ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... have ready a Theme to send off to Harvard. Of course, every Thursday morning We, with one accord, begin to make excuses. Well, the Dread Day rolls around to-morrow, and consequently I am deep in the Slough of Despond. My only consolation is that our Geniuses can't write regularly, but then the mood to write never possesses me.... This week, in writing a comparison between Hamlet and Antonio, I did succeed in jotting down something, ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the composite forces which maintained the Liberal Government in power through the crisis of 1910, the elements of such an organic view as may inspire and direct a genuine social progress. Liberalism has passed through its Slough of Despond, and in the give and take of ideas with Socialism has learnt, and taught, more than one lesson. The result is a broader and deeper movement in which the cooler and clearer minds recognize below the differences ...
— Liberalism • L. T. Hobhouse
... this turf her self in folds doth make. Here is no poyson for the Toad to feed; Here boldly spread thy hands, no venom'd Weed Dares blister them, no slimy Snail dare creep Over thy face when thou art fast asleep; Here never durst the babling Cuckow spit, No slough of falling Star did ever hit Upon this bank: let this thy Cabin be, This other set with Violets ...
— The Faithful Shepherdess - The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher (Vol. 2 of 10). • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... to drag you out of this wretched slough into which you are sinking. Whatever the ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... to accept new things, he carefully specified the location and size for each molding on his gun, protesting all the while the futility of such ornaments. Not until the last half of the next century were the experts well enough versed in metallurgy and interior ballistics to slough off ...
— Artillery Through the Ages - A Short Illustrated History of Cannon, Emphasizing Types Used in America • Albert Manucy
... You can lift twice or three times as much after you've been in training a month as you could before. And I can see that it's going to be just so with your son. His going through college won't hurt him,—he'll soon slough all that off,—and his bringing up won't; don't be anxious about it. I noticed in the army that some of the fellows that had the most go-ahead were fellows that hadn't ever had much more to do than girls before the war broke out. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... it gave him a momentary, a precarious footing. He could not regain his balance, he could not even for an instant stand upright on it. But from its support he leapt on convulsively, and, as a pike, flung from above, wounded him in the shoulder, he fell his length in the slough—but forward, with his outstretched hands resting on soil of a harder nature. They sank, it is true, to the elbow, but he dragged his body forward on them, and forward, and freeing one by a last effort of strength—he could not free both, and, as ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... said De Montaigne, "you have certainly made the most of an argument, which, if granted, would consign government to fools and knaves, and plunge the communities of mankind into the Slough of Despond. But a very commonplace view of the question might suffice to shake your system. Is life, mere animal life, on the whole, ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a modern day fad, But, Roger, you make a poor cynic, my lad. Your heart at the core is as sound as a nut, Though the wheels of your mind have dropped into the rut Of wrong thinking. You need a strong hand on the lever Of good common sense, and an earnest endeavor To pull yourself out of the slough of despond Back into the highway of peace just beyond. And now, here we are at Peace Castle in truth, And there stands its Chatelaine, sweet Sister Ruth, To welcome you, Roger; you'll find a new type In this old-fashioned girl, who in years scarcely ripe, And as childish in ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... shooting away down the river to the dredging work—Carlson insists I must advise him—and then up in to Sacramento, running over the Teal Slough land on the way, ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... To see if we will poise our life at last, To see if we will now at last be true To our own only true, deep-buried selves, Being one with which we are one with the whole world; Or whether we will once more fall away Into some bondage of the flesh or mind, Some slough of sense, or some fantastic maze Forged by the imperious lonely thinking-power. And each succeeding age in which we are born Will have more peril for us than the last; Will goad our senses with a sharper spur, Will fret our minds to an intenser play, ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... in a new shape. With his tawny locks always in wild confusion, his long legs and arms, loud voice, and continual activity, Ted was a prominent figure at Plumfield. He had his moods of gloom, and fell into the Slough of Despond about once a week, to be hoisted out by patient Rob or his mother, who understood when to let him alone and when to shake him up. He was her pride and joy as well as torment, being a very bright ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... literature (though she could hardly sign her own name) proved the up-looking of her better nature; and her charity was unbounded. Shall we—reared and instructed in all righteous ways—shall we show less charity to the memory of one who in her latter days rose out of the slough into which circumstance—not vice—had plunged her? Shall we be less charitable than the bishop who honored her memory and his own character by recording her benevolence, her penitence, her exemplary end? The good bishop's testimony renders it needless that we "point a moral." ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... college examinations. A Sunny Bank diploma was a sure passport. When the girls worked they worked hard, and when playtime came it was enjoyed to the full. Naturally, with so many dispositions surrounding her, Miss Preston often in secret floundered in a "slough of despond," for that which could influence one girl for her good might prove a complete failure when brought to bear upon another. Never was the old adage, "What is one man's meat is another ...
— Caps and Capers - A Story of Boarding-School Life • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... but eventful days, battling against adverse winds, and we come to anchor in a little slough, where a war-junk and several fishing vessels are already moored for the night. While supper is preparing I pass the time promenading back and forth along a little foot-trail leading for a short distance round ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... become sufficient to entirely arrest the circulation in any part, the structures soon die. The disorder manifests itself as lameness in one or more limbs; swelling about the ankle which may result in only a small slough or the loss of a toe, but it may circumscribe the limb at any point below the knee or hock by an indented ring below which the tissues become dead. The indentation soon changes to a crack, which extends completely around the limb, ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... is; it isn't because of anything he's done or has, it's just because it's HIM, I suppose, but I know my chance is gone for good! THAT leaves me free to act for her; no one can accuse me of doing it for myself. And I swear she sha'n't go through that slough of despond again while I have breath ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... were only two hundred yards on the other side of the parapet) walked on dry earth for at least ten paces. The officer's laughter was loud at the corner of the next traverse, when there was an abrupt descent into a slough of despond. ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... his memories of the pilgrims and their fairs on the Way, he may have had other scenes in his mind which suggested other names. The Delectable Mountains may have been the blue line of the Sussex Downs, or the hills by Black Down and Hindhead. The Slough of Despond may have been the marshy pools of Shalford Common, or the ponds under the hill by Chilworth; and Doubting Castle, spelt Dowding Castle, is actually a name to be found on the Surrey map, south of Epsom Downs on Banstead ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... highly anomalous situation. That land is not Belgian, and it is not international—except in a strictly legal sense. It is difficult to say what it is if it be not the private domain of King Leopold and of several monopolist-controlling trusts. Probably the only way out of the present slough of despond is the definite assumption of sole responsibility by the Belgian people; for it should be remembered that a very large number of patriotic Belgians urgently long to redress evils for which they feel themselves to be indirectly, and to a limited extent, ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... sings; The turtle to her make hath told her tale. Summer is come, for every spray now springs: The hart hath hung his old head on the pale; The buck in brake his winter coat he flings; The fishes flete with new repaired scale. The adder all her slough away she slings; The swift swallow pursueth the flies smale; The busy bee her honey now she mings; Winter is worn that was the flowers' bale. And thus I see among these pleasant things Each care decays, and yet my sorrow springs. ...
— The Principles of English Versification • Paull Franklin Baum
... the heavy slough of the pale, underworld, automatic colliers. He started out of the mud. He was master. She saw his back, the movement of his white loins. But not that—it was the whiteness he seemed to enclose as he bent forwards, rowing. He seemed to stoop to something. His glistening, whitish hair seemed ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... charms, especially when they are old and picturesque, and smell of the Middle Ages; but to be kept a prisoner in one of them by rainy weather is apt to plunge a restless wanderer into the Slough of Despond. The chances are that the inn itself becomes at such times a slough, so that Bunyan's expression is then applicable in a real as well as in a figurative sense. There is a constant coming in and going out of peasants with ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... of his acquaintance. He wanted especially to be with them in public places, and to see for himself, if possible, whether Cuckoo's accusation against Valentine were true. That a frightful change had taken place in Julian's life, and that he was rapidly sinking in a slough of wholly inordinate dissipation was clear enough. But did Valentine, this new, strange Valentine, lead him, or merely go with him, or stand aloof smiling at him and letting him take his own way like a foolish boy? That ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... circumstance only to learn to appreciate the liberty of law;—to know that license is the foe of freedom; and, though the sophistry of Passion in these books disgusted me, flowers of purest hue seemed to grow upon the dark and dirty ground. I thought she had cast aside the slough of her past life, and begun a new existence beneath the sun of a ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... sand for small work, I consented to go to San Jose and get some for them. I engaged Mr. Watts, who had a little schooner that would carry about six tons. He was captain and I was super-cargo, and we made the trip down in about one day. I found what I wanted on the banks of a slough, loaded the schooner and returned to San Francisco. While in San Jose I came across two young ladies. I had a very pleasant chat with them. I learned later on that they were the daughters of Mr. Burnett, ...
— California 1849-1913 - or the Rambling Sketches and Experiences of Sixty-four - Years' Residence in that State. • L. H. Woolley
... for a man, did he not have Hamlet's doubt to face, I think perhaps we would all be better off for no knowledge of that subjective war. Man has too much to do to lift himself out of the still clinging primordial slough to dally with subjectiveness. We should be acting, aggressive, strident in the strength of the war we wage ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... cigarette. I watched the first few puffs, awaiting a repartee. None came. I felt a qualm of apprehension. Was he already becoming de-Paragot-ised? I did not realise then what it means to a man to cast aside the slough of many years' decay, and take his stand clean before the world. He shivers, is liable to catch cold, like the tramp whose protective hide of filth is summarily removed in the workhouse bath. Nor did my dear lady realise this. How could she, bright freed creature, hungering ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... saying" (Lord Southend spoke a little lower), "she went straight from the Duchess of Slough's ball to the station, as she was, in a low gown and a scarlet opera cloak—met Edge, whose wife had only been dead three months—and went off with him. You know the rest of the story. It was a near run for young Harry Tristram! ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... it, mon. I have led them astray. By jingo, there's not a pond or a slough within five miles of the place but they ...
— She Stoops to Conquer - or, The Mistakes of a Night. A Comedy. • Oliver Goldsmith
... name be us amang, What is this? for Saint James!—I may not well gang. I trust I be the same. Ah! my neck has lain wrang Enough Mickle thank, since yester-even Now, by Saint Stephen! I was flayed with a sweven,—[140] My heart out of slough.[141] I thought Gill began to croak, and travail full sad, Well nigh at the first cock,—of a young lad, For to mend our flock: then be I never glad. To have two on my rock,—more than ever I had. Ah, my head! A house full of young tharmes,[142] The devil knock out their harnes![143] ...
— Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction • Anonymous
... thou criest out in vain For this once," said my Lord; "thou shalt not have us Longer than in the passing of the slough." ...
— Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell • Dante Alighieri
... men who led the Republican party to its duty and its mission, who overcame the numbers of the opposition, who lifted their associates from the slough of prejudice and led them out of the darkness of tradition, let there be all honor and praise. They gave hope to the hopeless, help to the helpless, liberty to the downtrodden. They did more: they elevated the character and enlightened ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... purity to the Lord that called us. One may well wonder where a Galilean fisherman got the impulse that lifted him to such a height; one may well wonder that he ventured to address such wide, absolute commandments to the handful of people just dragged from the very slough and filth of heathenism to whom he spoke. But he had dwelt with Christ, and they had Christ in their hearts. So for him to command and for them to obey, and to aim after even so wide and wonderful an ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... sort of training and temperament, swept here like dust by the war into common anonymity. I do not remember any picture of the war more curious, and, as it were, uncanny than the first sight of Zossen as our motor came lurching down the muddy road from Berlin—that huge, forgotten eddy, that slough of idle, aimless human beings against the gray March sky, milling slowly round and ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... Rhode Island still admitted only a freeholder or his eldest son to citizenship. New York had only three years before abandoned property qualification for white men to vote and still demanded from negroes an estate of $250 for this inestimable privilege; so slowly did we slough off the inherited idea and ancient custom of being admitted to freemen's rights instead of ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... sorry at the double life he was leading. If it were possible to establish the death of the wastrel he was personating he would perhaps allow his "father" to live on in this new-found happiness; but if the real D.V.W. were alive some effort must be made to help him out of the slough—perhaps to bring him back. He would try to find ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... manner in which ten minutes in the society of a man, who would have been adjudged by many most uninspiring, had transformed me. It seemed the mere sight of this simple bushman, in his 'bell-bottomed' Sunday trousers, had lifted me up from a slough of hopeless inertia to a plane upon which life was a master musician, and all my veins the strings from which he drew his ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... of us honest Sussex folk. We are all, it seems, to receive the Queen at what they call the Gallery-tower, and witness some fooleries there; and then we're to remain in attendance upon the Queen in the Great Hall—God bless the mark!—while those who are now waiting upon her Grace get rid of their slough, and doff their riding-suits. Heaven help me, if her Grace should speak to me, I shall never know ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... household. Their resource is to take service with people only a step or two above the poorest class, with whom they fare scantily, endure harsh treatment, lead shifting and precarious lives, and finally drop into the slough of evil, through which, in their best estate, they do but pick their ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... "line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little, there a little." And I would caution my readers not to expect too much all at once. But I am fully convinced that as faith, trust, and naturalness grow, worry will cease, will slough off, like the dead skin of the serpent, and leave those once bound by it free from its malign influence. Who cannot see and feel that such a consummation is devoutly to be wished, worth working and ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... circulation of the part to healthy action, is the liniment of belladona, two drachms; the liniment of aconite, one drachm; carbolic acid, ten drops; collodion flexile, one ounce; painted with a camel's hair pencil over their surface. When the chilblains vesicate, ulcerate or slough, it is better to omit the aconite and apply the other components of the liniment without it. The collodion flexile forms a coating or protecting film, which excludes the air, while the sedative liniments allay the irritation, generally of no trivial nature. For chapped hands we ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... miners: he recognized merit when he saw it. From that morning a feeling of self-respect dawned upon me, I was not so altogether ignorant as I had thought myself, I had some available knowledge; and with that feeling came the determination to raise myself out of that slough of despond into which I had fallen ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... marvellous power of mere money, of the lucre which philosophers pretend to despise and men sell their souls for. His heart almost burst in its admiration for that extraordinary Nella, who by mere personal force had raised two men out of the deepest slough of despair to the blissful heights of hope and happiness. 'These Anglo-Saxons,' he said to himself, ...
— The Grand Babylon Hotel • Arnold Bennett
... The town had been on fire; in a blaze. But at night it had come on to rain in torrents, and all night long it had rained without cessation. We had a pair of very strong horses, but travelled at the rate of little more than a couple of miles an hour, through one unbroken slough of black mud and water. It had no variety but in depth. Now it was only half over the wheels, now it hid the axletree, and now the coach sank down in it almost to the windows. The air resounded in all directions with the loud chirping of the frogs, who, with the pigs (a coarse, ugly ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... swearing by my soul! Take me, O thou of large eyes, me—a maiden come to thee of her own accord—one unbetrothed to another, one desirous of thy grace!' Although she spoke in this strain, Salwa, however, O chief of the Bharatas, rejected that daughter of the ruler of Kasi, like a snake casting off his slough. Indeed, although that king was earnestly solicited with diverse expressions such as these, the lord of the Salwas still did not, O bull of the Bharata race, manifest any inclination for accepting the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... 'Dutch Original,' and made notes from it;—there is not the slightest resemblance in it to anything in the 'Pilgrim's Progress. The three striking circumstances which you mentioned of the 'Hill of Difficulty,' the 'Slough of Despond,' and 'Vanity Fair,' do not afford any ground for supposing that Bunyan had ever heard of this book; or that even if he had read it, he should have taken one hint from it. Here the incidents are, 1st that the wilful Pilgrim stops in a village crowd to see some juggler's tricks ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... At the first sound of the words, we all think of some one unhappy soul we know just now, whom they suggest. Nobody is ever without at least one brother, sister, cousin, or friend on hand, who is struggling through this social slough of despond; and nobody ever will be, so long as the world goes on taking it for granted that the slough is a necessity, and that the road must go through it. Nature never meant any such thing. Now and then she blunders or ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... nature that destruction and death of the tissues follows; not only of the skin but of the flesh and bones in the worst cases. It is impossible to tell by the appearance of the skin what the extent of the destruction may be until the dead parts slough away after a week or ten days. The skin is of a uniform white color in some cases, or may be of a yellow, brown, gray, or black hue, and is comparatively insensitive at first. Pus ("matter") begins to form around the dead part in a few days, and the dead tissue ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume I (of VI) • Various
... all she had lost, would be anyhow a bit of a comfort to her. And then I remembered how she belonged to me, how she had been given to me by her own father to cherish and care for. And so I plucked up courage to intrude upon her while she was still wallowing in her Slough of Despair. And I didn't pester her with preliminaries. We're past that stage, you and I, Muriel. I simply came to her because it seemed absurd to wait any longer. And I just asked her humble-like to fix a day when we would ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... the desk, Chapman's solitary response coming from the gallery; and while the second singing—four verses from Tate and Brady—was going on, we beheld the surplice stripped off,—like the slough of a May-fly, as Griff said,—when a rusty black gown was revealed, in which the curate ascended the pulpit and was lost to our view before the concluding verse of the psalm, which we had reason ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... inflammation of the mouth, throat, and tongue." Among the old herbalists who pretended to cure every ill that flesh is heir to with it, it was variously known as carpenter's herb, sicklewort, hook-heal, slough-heal, and brownwort. ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... Spain, Mexico, and Russia revolted against the tyranny which had held them in the slough of medieval degradation, they likewise, in recent times, proved that they realized that their submission was as much caused by the Church, allied as it is with the state, as by the ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... a part of the man," he said. "Take it away by force and he will bleed to death; but if the time comes when he no longer needs it, he will either slough it or convert it into something ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... door, was none other than a fairy prince, who will this very day lift you from the slough of grovelling poverty to the realms of affluence and prosperity. Good ...
— Oh! Susannah! - A Farcical Comedy in Three Acts • Mark Ambient
... to my own inexperience and mistake than to a want of skill or fidelity in my instructors. And thus for a time I was occupied by exploded systems, mingling, like an unadept, a thousand contradictory theories and floundering desperately in a very slough of multifarious knowledge, guided by an ardent imagination and childish reasoning, till an accident again changed the current of my ideas. When I was about fifteen years old we had retired to our house near Belrive, when we witnessed a most violent and terrible thunderstorm. It advanced from ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... a fine boat, one of my children was taken with croup. Dr. N——, a Universalist minister, got off at Dubuque and bought medicine for me. This saved the child, but he was sick all the way. We were stuck in Beef Slough for several days. I never left the cabin as my child needed me, but some time during the first day a boat from St. Paul was stuck there too, so near us that passengers passed from one boat to the ...
— Old Rail Fence Corners - The A. B. C's. of Minnesota History • Various
... made a circuit,—came by the old trail around the head of the slough. We haven't passed anybody, have we, Tony?" he asked of the ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... perceived, at least, that it is harder far for one corrupted from her very childhood, corrupted by the very parents who should have guided, with all her highest qualities of mind and body perverted studiously till they had hardened into vices, to raise herself erect at once from the slough of sensuality and sin, and spring aloft, as the butterfly transmuted from the grub, into the purity and loveliness of virtue—than for one, who hath known no trial, suffered no temptation, to hold the path of ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... nation must have its seers and prophets, lest it forget its high calling to press forward, and so sink in the slough of contented ease. The preacher of ideals is the architect of a nation's hopes and desires, and the fulfilment of these hopes and desires will depend on the wisdom of its political builders—the practical politicians. Often enough the structural alterations are so extensive that the ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... treatment which would have been thrown away upon the melodramatic subjects which Verdi had hitherto affected. Much of his music is really graceful and refined, but his efforts to avoid vulgarity occasionally land him in the slough of sentimentality. Nevertheless, the pathos which characterises some of the scenes has kept 'La Traviata' alive, though the opera is chiefly employed now as a means of allowing a popular prima donna to display her high ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... many quicksands, or the like, hereabout. Never heard tell of 'em, if there are. Old Tobe lost a cow once in some slough." ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... animosity. Old men with one foot in the grave, in this year 1895, are still accusing each other of embezzling acres of it; the devil of Discord, and Mercury the god of thieves, encamped upon it; the Port Albert Company fell into its Slough of Despond, which in the Court of Equity was known as "Kemmis v. Orr," and there all ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... terrors, it was almost unbearable. The pure unspoilt passion of it—the careless, confident joy—seemed to make an outcast of her, as she sat there in the dark, dragged back by the shock and horror of Delane's appearance into the slime and slough of old memories, and struggling with them in vain. Yes, she was "damaged goods"—she was unfit to marry George Ellesborough. But she would marry him! She set her teeth—clinging to him with all the energy ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... in the villages have all departed, and the recollection that they have been here makes the solitude more complete. The woods in which they wandered are impassable, for the rain has been heavy, and the dry, baked clay of August has been turned into a slough a foot deep. The wind, what there is of it, is from the south-west, soft, sweet and damp; the sky is almost covered with bluish-grey clouds, which here and there give way and permit a dim, watery gleam to float slowly over the distant pastures. The grass for the most part ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... the moment: people do not reflect deeply when they are in the first happiness of escape from an intolerably oppressive situation. Like Bunyan's pilgrim they could not see the wicket gate, nor the Slough of Despond, nor the castle of Giant Despair; but they saw the shining light at the end of the path, and so started gaily towards ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... the proper moment, gave orders to fire upon the advancing enemy. The volley checked them, although they returned the compliment, and shot one of our party through the leg. Frank McCarthy then sang out, “Boys, make a break for the slough yonder, and we can have the bank for ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... Fort Hall, where the Oregon emigration went north'ard, and swung south for Californy," was his way of concluding the narrative of that arduous journey. "And Bill Ping and me used to rope grizzlies out of the underbrush of Cache Slough in the Sacramento Valley." ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... and ignorant what fate by fire or iron might be their portion ere the night was done. They saw the corn that was their winter store to save their offspring from famine poured out like ditch-water. They saw oats and wheat flung down to be trodden into a slough of mud and filth. They saw the walnut presses in their kitchens broken open, and their old heirlooms of silver, centuries old, borne away as booty. They saw the oak cupboards in their wives' bed-chambers ransacked, ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... distinguished personages among his friends, from Madame de Stael to Alexander Baring of the famous London banking house. Unlike many native Americans he did not need to learn the ways of European courts, because he was to the manner born: he had no provincial habits which he must slough off or conceal. Also he knew himself and the happy qualities with which Nature had endowed him—patience, philosophic composure, unfailing good humor. All these qualities were to be laid under heavy requisition in the work ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... tugged and lambasted, with a right good will, but all to no effect. Our ponies did their best, but they could not pull the democrat out of that slough. ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... proceeded, when the dog seized me again, and I again roughly forced him from me. At this juncture my attention was directed to several hatchet-marks on the deck, and I instantly inquired the meaning. The answer was, 'The snake, sir! the snake is loose!' And so it proved. The reptile had cast his slough, and assumed with renewed beauty all its natural energy. It had forced itself out of the cage, and after doing some damage below, found its way to the deck, spreading consternation among the men; by whom, as it appeared, it had been slightly wounded, ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... his clasp-knife about the cooking. Then I carried the sack about a hundred yards across the grass and through the willows east of the house, to a shallow lake that was five mile wide and full of rushes—and ducks too, you might say, in the season. There was a slough or a creek leading out of it on the other side that went miles away, I don't know where, but it didn't go to the river. The meal sifted out and made a little track all the way to the lake. I dropped ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... concerned with the contemplation of his own likeness, he contemplates also the causes which produce that likeness. Is Epicurus right when he asserts that images proceed forth from us, as it were a kind of slough that continually streams from our bodies? These images when they strike anything smooth and solid are reflected by the shock and reversed in such wise as to give back an image turned to face its original. Or should we accept the view maintained by other ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... you don't have to, as they say in Maine. And I admit that all I saw was from a curtained auto as we swayed and bumped over broken roads, with an occasional interlude when Jeremy and I got out to lend our shoulders and help the Arab driver heave the car out of a slough. ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... that day worked together for its fulfilment. We too must be purified by fire and sword; and may we not hope that our beloved country may emerge from the slaughter, the ruin, and the conflagration, more prosperous, more powerful than ever before, and casting off the slough of impurity that has for long years been hardening upon her, renovated and redeemed by the struggle, sweep majestically on to a purer and nobler destiny than even our past has given promise of, and attain a loftier position than any nation on ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... alone varied the monotony of the dreary days they spent in that mournful slough, and if it had not been for the regular exercise at the levers, and the hope of a speedy release from their surroundings, the young explorers must have succumbed. As it was, they lost colour, became pale, languid, and heavy-eyed; and Mr. Hume, noting ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... to ask the dark-clouded Son of Cronos that he should be deathless and live eternally; and Zeus bowed his head to her prayer and fulfilled her desire. Too simply was queenly Eos: she thought not in her heart to ask youth for him and to strip him of the slough of deadly age. So while he enjoyed the sweet flower of life he lived rapturously with golden-throned Eos, the early-born, by the streams of Ocean, at the ends of the earth; but when the first grey hairs began to ripple from his comely head and noble chin, queenly Eos kept away ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... spare The moderate means I owe to his wise care, 'Twas, "See the life that son of Albius leads! Observe that Barrus, vilest of ill weeds! Plain beacons these for heedless youth, whose taste Might lead them else a fair estate to waste:" If lawless love were what he bade me shun, "Avoid Scetanius' slough," his words would run: "Wise men," he'd add, "the reasons will explain Why you should follow this, from that refrain: For me, if I can train you in the ways Trod by the worthy folks of earlier days, And, while you need direction, keep your name And life unspotted, I've attained ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... born from me and from her." As time went on, the finding of a serpent skin around Nero's neck when he was but a boy caused the seers to say: "He shall acquire great power from the aged man." Serpents are thought to slough off their old age with their old skin, and ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume V., Books 61-76 (A.D. 54-211) • Cassius Dio
... in chorus): The vulture her carrion swallows, Returns to his vomit the dog. In the slough of uncleanliness wallows The he-goat, and revels the hog. Men are wise with their schools and their teachers, Men are just with their creeds and their priests; Yet, in spite of their pedants and preachers, They ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... came up to Alida's room to help her sort and address them. "You certainly have your share this year," she said, laughing. "Do you remember what a slough of despond you were ...
— Cicely and Other Stories • Annie Fellows Johnston
... months succeeding that hideous night when in paralyzed silence she watched Garrison away. The greatest sorrow is stagnant, not active. The heart becomes like a frozen morass. Sometimes memory slips through the crust, only to sink in the grim "slough ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... company seemed to make hastily for the shore on receiving this intelligence. A driver was left with the cart; but at length, when, after repeated and hairbreadth escapes, it actually stuck fast in a slough or quicksand, the fellow, with an oath, cut the harness, and, as I presume, departed with the horses, whose feet I heard splashing over the wet sand and through the ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott
... to Slough, where he was introduced to Herschel. In this case there was something like real community of tastes, for the astronomer was musical, having once played the oboe, and later on acted as organist, first at Halifax Parish Church, and then at the ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... best traditions in that Battle of Jutland, it seems nothing short of criminal that the English censor should have permitted the world to hold Great Britain in contempt for twenty-four hours and sink poor France in the slough of despond. However, he is used to abuse, and presumably ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... hope of victory is slender indeed: yet to us now living it seems as if man had not yet lost all that part of his soul which longs for beauty: nay we cannot but hope that it is not yet dying. If we are not deceived in that hope, if the art of to-day has really come alive out of the slough of despond which we call the eighteenth century, it will surely grow and gather strength and draw to it other forms of intellect and hope that now scarcely know it; and then, whatever changes it may go through, ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... Here and there were long, deep pools in the bed of the river, where rushes and lilies grew and huge mailed garfish swam slowly just beneath the surface of the water. Once my two companions stopped to pull a mired cow out of a slough, hauling with ropes from their saddle horns. In places there were half-dry pools, out of the regular current of the river, the water green and fetid. The trees were very tall and large. The streamers ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... the time," said the old man drily; "and it has long been a commonplace that that slough awaits State Socialism in the end, if it gets to the end, which as you know it did not with us. However it went further than this minimum and maximum business, which by the by we can now see was necessary. The government now found it imperative on ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... year after my failure would be incomplete without its testimony to the devotion of my wife and children under the new conditions. My wife was a glorious sunbeam whose rays of cheerfulness never dimmed. Her wonderful spirits and courage lifted me out of the Slough of Despondency, and her love and tenderness ...
— The Romance and Tragedy • William Ingraham Russell
... lines. He had made a mistake, had put himself outside the sympathies of this comfortable circle. Miss Hitchcock was looking into the flowers in front of her, evidently searching for some remark that would lead the dinner out of this uncomfortable slough, when Brome Porter began ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... moorland, and when he learned they had to pass a wood expressed his pleasure. 'For,' said he, 'I am passionately fond of trees. Trees and fair lawns, if you consider of it rightly, are the ornaments of nature, as palaces and fine approaches—' And here he stumbled into a patch of slough and nearly fell. The girl had hard work not to laugh, but at heart she was lost in admiration for one ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and Illinois, which wash two sides, it has the Suycartee slough, running through its western border, and navigable for steamboats, and a number of smaller creeks. The land and surface various,—much of it excellent undulating soil,—some rich alluvion, inundated at high water,—large ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... guineas, there will be no hope in Literature. What if our next set of Souls'-Overseers were to be silent ones very mainly?—Alas, alas, why gaze into the blessed continents and delectable mountains of a Future based on truth, while as yet we struggle far down, nigh suffocated in a slough of lies, uncertain whether or how we shall be able ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... every one declaring that it had been a great treat. Larry kept the two drumsticks as well as the wings of the gobbler. Possibly he might many a time feel a queer little sensation creeping up and down his spinal column as memory carried him back again to that slough, where the treacherous black mud was slowly ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... dog-sleds over mountains of snow. One had to surmise much, of course, regarding William's experience in Canada. His letters were all of his inner life. He said much regarding his spiritual condition, of his grievous lapses of faith, of his days on the Delectable Mountains and of his descents into the Slough of Despond, but very little of the hills and valleys of his adopted country. Once, shortly after his arrival, he had stated that he was living in a shanty where the bush came right up to the door. Margaret had had some misgivings, but Cousin Griselda had explained that a shanty was in all probability ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... entertained precisely the same opinion. It is not, therefore, surprising that two young men like Frank and Vernon should be well pleased with their quarters, or that, having so early gotten into the slough of love, they should daily continue to sink deeper into the mire. The young poet's lame leg, though not a very serious affair, was still sufficient to keep him for several days a close prisoner to the house; but if any one had asked him—no, we don't go so far as to say that, for if ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... was an old person of Slough, Who danced at the end of a bough; But they said, "If you sneeze, you might damage the trees, You imprudent old ...
— Nonsense Books • Edward Lear
... for the reporter, and I did not miss it. The city as landlord in the Bend was fair game. The old houses came down at last, and for a twelvemonth, while a reform government sat at the City Hall, the three-acre lot lay, a veritable slough of despond filled with unutterable nastiness, festering in the sight of men. No amount of prodding seemed able to get it out of that, and all the while money given for the relief of the people was going ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... piece of tape or twine may be tied around the tail, which will immediately arrest the bleeding. This ligature should not remain on longer than a few hours, as the parts included in it will be apt to slough and make a mangy ulcer, ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... Now Bateson has been going on like this for thirty years or more; yet if there's roast pork on the table, and I say a word to put him off it, he's that hurt as never was. Why, I'm only too glad to see him enjoying his food if no harm comes of it; but it's dreary work seeing your husband in the Slough of Despond, especially when it's your business to drag him out again, and most especially when you particularly ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... their utter lack of interest amuses me. I will be honest with the reader, though, and any Master Pliable is free to forsake me at this point; for I cannot promise to be really livelier than my walk. There is a Slough of Despond in full view, and not a Delectable Mountain to be seen, unless you choose so to call the high lands about Waltham, which we shall behold dark blue against the western sky presently. As I sally forth upon Benicia Street, the whole ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... each project, being inspired by imperfect ideals, failed more or less, or changed its character from time to time. The first and third projects were at one time guided by the same hand; but the first project gradually cast off its colonizing slough, and resolved itself once more into discovery for discovery's sake; and the third project ceased to be a plan of campaign, and resolved itself into sober and peaceful schemes for settling in the land. ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... one time they present the phenomena of the one, at another of the other. They are the people who complain of the cyclic quality of their moods and purposes. Their mood will be a heaven of exaltation and exhilaration, and then descend into a slough of despond from which they feel themselves inextricable. They are always talking about the ups and downs of their mental states. Headache and languor and fatigability, dry skin and lack of appetite for food or exertion on one day or for one week, give way on ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... time in the school. If they tried to make it interesting there would be a better attendance. It is all nonsense to spend one's whole time in getting up dainty dishes, and recherche toilets for one's babies. At all events we must arouse ourselves from this slough of indifference and give our best energies to the work. We have not made half a trial yet. How can we expect success to follow aught but ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... influences are used, as they should be, for the general national good. They work separately, or too much as individuals. It is only the leavening of these institutions with a large spirit of the national destiny that will lift Britain . . . out of its present material slough." (The Outlook, November 17, 1906.) These words are almost a paraphrase of Mr. Wells' ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... squash; Gingham yet, Mackintosh; Lawns afloat, Paths dirt; Top-coat, Flannel shirt; Lilacs drenched, Laburnums pallid; Spirits quenched, Souls squalid; Tennis "off," Icy breeze; Croak, cough, Wheeze, sneeze; Cramped cricket, Arctic squall; Drenched wicket, Soaked ball; Park a puddle. Row a slough; Muck, muddle, Slush, snow; Hay-fever (No hay!) Spoilt beaver, Shoes asplay; Lilies flopping, Washed-out roses; Eaves dropping, Red noses; Pools, splashes, Spouts, spirts; Swollen sashes. Gutters, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 100, 13 June 1891 • Various
... this action and recognized that his country could not emerge from the slough of revolution without American assistance, he was depressed at the condition of affairs, and in view of his physical feebleness felt himself unequal to the task of guiding the country through impending difficulties. He therefore on May 6, 1916, resigned ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... with one only pip. No doubt 'twas destined for some lofty soul Who in a deck-chair lolls, and marks the map And says, "Push here," while I and all my kind Scrabble and slaughter in the appointed slough. But I, presumptuous, wore it, till the gods Called for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, October 31, 1917 • Various
... displayed in the logical department of Huxley's Physical Basis of Life; where, after trying to persuade us to put our feet on the ladder which leads in the reverse direction from Jacob's, and to descend with him into the slough of materialism, and affirming that "our thoughts are the expression of molecular changes in that matter of life which is the source of our other vital phenomena;" he goes on to say, that he does not believe in materialism. And he tries to vindicate himself by asserting that "we ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... to make an excursion to Windsor on Saturday, and have an audience before Prince Albert's lunch. I was with the Queen in her closet, solus cum sola. But I should first tell you my difficulty about getting from the station at Slough to the Castle. When we go down for a council we have a special train and carriages provided for us. I consulted Morpeth, who answered, 'I can only tell you how I went last—on the top of an omnibus; but the Queen ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... his head on his bosom in evident despair. "I thought," he murmured, "that he had changed his slough, and come forth so glorious, all too soon. May the eyes drop out that were cheated with those baubles, a plumed ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... people out of their troubles was not helping the Days out of their particular Slough of Despond. So many difficulties seemed reaching out to clutch at Janice and Daddy! The girl thought it was like walking through a briar-patch. Every step they took, trouble ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... the Colonel, "your talk is all nonsense, we are trying to extricate Wilmington from the slough of infamy into which it has been plunged by Radicals. We are going to elevate the white man to his place and regulate Sambo to his sphere, if the streets have to flow with blood to accomplish that end. Good niggers who know their places will be protected; but these half educated black rascals ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... Holland narrates, "Lincoln was one day riding by a deep slough or pit in which, to his exceeding pain, he saw a pig struggling, and with such faint efforts that it was evident that he could not extricate himself. Lincoln looked at the pig and the mud that enveloped him, and then looked ruefully ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... cozeners: for so soon as I came beyond Eton, they threw me off, from behind one of them, in a slough of mire; and set spurs and away, like three ...
— The Merry Wives of Windsor - The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] • William Shakespeare
... neck, back, back part of the limbs, and under the arms. Their presence is evidence of a depressed condition of vitality. These tumors vary in size from one-half an inch to six inches in diameter, and rapidly proceed to a gangrenous condition, a grayish slough being ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... the paralleling bluffs lay at a distance, and broke their ridge-back far up the scarlet coulee; from where, southward, stretched a wide gap—ten broad and gently undulating miles—that ended at the slough-studded base of Medicine Mountain. Evan Lancaster, as he stood bareheaded under the unclouded sky, looked about him upon acres heavy with tangled grass and weeds; and pleased with the evident richness of the untouched ground, and with the sheltered situation of the claim on the ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... across a wet meadow. Swan Lake was not a true lake, but merely a widening of the river where it filled a depression among its low hills. With its flat, reedy shores it had more the characteristics of a prairie slough. As in the last village, the tepees were raised in a double row alongside a small stream which made its way across the meadow to the lake. In the middle of their village the stream rippled over shallows, and here they had placed stepping-stones for their convenience in crossing. Below ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... or more of these are successfully forded, though not without some difficulty; but we finally arrive at the parent slough, of which the others are but tributaries. This proves too deep for the sowars' horses to ford, and after surveying the yellow flood some minutes and searching up and down, the khan declares ruefully that we shall have to return to Beerjand. As I remonstrate with ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... waiting about two hours I hear the tramp of horses in the distance. Now the team is made ready, the two extra horses are attached in front, the coachman takes his place on the box, and with united strength our animals drag the heavy vehicle up out of the slough. We roll and jolt on again with lumps of wet clay dropping and splashing round ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... himself in a good cause. Upon his friends R. H. D. had the same effect. And it was not only in proximity that he could distribute energy, but from afar, by letter and cable. He had some intuitive way of knowing just when you were slipping into a slough of laziness and discouragement. And at such times he either appeared suddenly upon the scene, or there came a boy on a bicycle, with a yellow envelope and a book to sign, or the postman in his buggy, or the telephone rang and ...
— Appreciations of Richard Harding Davis • Various
... beings sink to the depths in which John B. Gough found himself at the age of twenty-five years. By sheer force of will he raised himself from the slough in which he wallowed, till he attained a position honored among men, and performed a service of ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various
... crossed some rocky low hills, with scanty vegetation, and, after passing the cattle hacienda of San Jose, reached the plains of the same name, about two leagues in width, now dry and dusty, but in the wet season forming a great slough of water and tenacious mud, through which the mules have to ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... every tradesman claims a share in it; the nature of trade requires it. It is an old Anglicism, 'Such a man drives a trade;' the allusion is to a carter, that with his voice, his hands, his whip, and his constant attendance, keeps the team always going, helps himself, lifts at the wheel in every slough, doubles his application upon every difficulty, and, in a word, to complete the simile, if he is not always with his horses, either the wagon is set in a hole, or the team stands still, or, which is worst of all, the load is spoiled by the ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe
... concerned to hear that Mrs. Dade was not at home. "Gone over to the hospital with Mrs. Blake and the doctor," was the explanation, and these gentle-hearted women, it seems, were striving to do something to rouse the lad from the slough of despond which had engulfed him. That night "Pink" Marble, Hay's faithful book-keeper and clerk for many a year, a one-armed veteran of the civil war, calling, as was his invariable custom when the trader was absent, to leave ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... of five and fifty pounds? Us, who wore bearskins in the burning tropics And marched bareheaded through the snows of Russia, Who trotted casually from Spain to Austria? Us who, to free our travel-weary legs, Like carrots from the slough of miry roads, Often with both hands had to lug them out? Us, who, not having jujubes for our coughs, Took day-long foot-baths in the freezing Danube? Who just had leisure when some officer Came riding up, and gayly cried "To arms! The enemy is on us! Drive him back!" To ...
— L'Aiglon • Edmond Rostand
... restoration to that past felicity. The paradise lost is to be regained. How it is to be done the sages are not agreed. But they of old were unanimous that some divinity must lend his aid, that some god-sent guide is needed to rescue man from the slough of wretchedness in which ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... little map in my pocket-book of the various twists and turns of the road through that vast Slough of Despond, marking them from hour to hour as we followed its devious wanderings. On studying this at the end of that part of our journey I realised afresh how utterly impossible it would have been for us to thread that misty maze where a few false steps would always have meant death ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... human nature. If I hadn't, I'd have more money, I s'pose. Perhaps you've noticed that those who trust a good deal are usually poor. It's all right, Mr. Ellery; you go and take your walk. And I'll walk into that pantry closet. It'll be a good deal like walkin' into the Slough of Despond, but Christian came out on the other side and I guess likely I will, if the supply of ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... try the big slough to-morrow," said Mr. Kincaid, more as an audible thought than as ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... become his own. He has lived among its visions and voices of heaven till all sense of possible unreality has died away. He tells his tale with such a perfect naturalness that allegories become living things, that the Slough of Despond and Doubting Castle are as real to us as places we see every day, that we know Mr. Legality and Mr. Worldly Wiseman as if we had met them in the street. It is in this amazing reality of impersonation that Bunyan's imaginative genius specially displays itself. But ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... and a bit of a smile continually bitten in as she regarded me. She seemed indeed like the very spirit of mischief, and, walking briskly in the room, had soon involved me in a kind of quarrel over nothing and (at the least) with nothing intended on my side. I was like Christian in the slough—the more I tried to clamber out upon the side, the deeper I became involved; until at last I heard her declare, with a great deal of passion, that she would take that answer at the hands of none, and I must down upon my ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... One Captain strictly forbade it on board his lugger; but he, also continuing to get no fish, called out, 'Swear away, lads, and see what that'll do.' Perhaps he only meant as Menage's French Bishop did; who going one day to Court, his carriage stuck fast in a slough. The Coachman swore; the Bishop, putting his head out of the window, bid him not do that; the Coachman declared that unless he did, his horses would never get the carriage out of the mud. 'Well then, says the Bishop, just for ...
— Two Suffolk Friends • Francis Hindes Groome
... him go. The colloquy had not only done me no service, but had positively emboldened him—or so I seemed to perceive as the weeks went on—in his efforts to cast off his old slough and become a travesty of me, as he had been a travesty of my uncle. I am willing to believe that they caused him pain. A crust of habit so inveterate as his cannot be rent without throes, to the severity of which his facial contortions bore witness whenever ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... one would need an hour to satisfy. And all attempts would be futile to make them understand that, while they plagued him with futile questions, a murderer and spy and thief was making good his escape, being afforded ample opportunity to slough all traces of his recent work and resume ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... longer before she was sufficiently calm to comprehend me. Never did unhappy parents before experience greater bitterness of soul. I strove to comfort her, but she would not listen to my words; for oh, they were as the blind leading the blind; we both were struggling in the slough of despair—both were in the pit of dark, bewildering misery. We sometimes sat looking at each other, like criminals whose last hour is come; and even when our grief wore itself into a "calm sough," there was something in our silence as dismal and more hopeless than ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... was to be her daily task to tend him and help to make him stronger in order that he might go away without delay. She only knew that every moment of the next few weeks was going to be full of a greater happiness than she had ever tasted. As we get deeper into the slough of life most of us learn to be thankful that the future is hidden—some of us recognise the wisdom and the mercy which decree that even the present ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... though the lake itself was still half a mile distant across a wet meadow. Swan Lake was not a true lake, but merely a widening of the river where it filled a depression among its low hills. With its flat, reedy shores it had more the characteristics of a prairie slough. As in the last village, the tepees were raised in a double row alongside a small stream which made its way across the meadow to the lake. In the middle of their village the stream rippled over shallows, and here they had placed stepping-stones ...
— The Woman from Outside - [on Swan River] • Hulbert Footner
... man, who shall a thousand times repeat those three (or om, the vyahritis, and the gayatri) apart from the multitude, shall be released in a month even from a great offence, as a snake from his slough. ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... do not realize that plant roots adsorb water and water-soluble nutrients only through the tiny hairs and actively growing tips near the very end of the root. The ability for any new root to absorb nutrition only lasts a short time, then the hairs slough off and the root develops a sort of hard bark. If root system growth slows or stops, the plant's ability to obtain nourishment is greatly reduced. Roots cannot make oxygen out of carbon dioxide as do the leaves. That's why it is so important to maintain a good supply of soil air ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... Bay, to the confluence of the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers, is sixty-three square miles. The total bay area is therefore four hundred and eighty square miles; and there are hundreds of miles of slough, river, and creek. A yachtsman, starting from Alviso, at the southern end of the bay, may sail in one general direction one hundred and fifty-four miles to Sacramento, before turning. All of this, of course, in ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... frequent than that, after the first dawnings of a Christian life in a heart, there should come a period of overclouding; or that, as John Bunyan has taught us, when Christian has gone through the wicket-gate, he should fall very soon into the Slough of Despond. One looks round, and sees how many professing Christians there are who, perhaps, were nearer Jesus Christ on the day of their conversion than they have ever been since, and how many cases of arrested development there are amongst professing ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... atajo sin trabajo," there is no short cut without a deal of labour. This proverb is very true, as I know by my own experience, for I never took a short cut in my life, and I have taken many in my wanderings, without falling down, getting into a slough, or losing my way. On the present occasion I lost my way, and wandered about for nearly two hours amidst rocks, thickets, and precipices, without being able to find it. The temperance woman, however, spoke nothing but the truth when she said I should see some fine scenery. From a rock ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... it appears hopelessly lost in the slough of a Glek-Nas, re-emerges fresh and lively as if from an invigorating plunge into the Fountain of Youth. O Paris, 'foyer des idees, et oeil du monde!'—animated contrast to the serene tranquillity of the Vril-ya, which, nevertheless, thy noisiest philosophers ever pretend to make the goal ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... from the dead form of the woman on Osiris' knee there issued forth another form and stood before us, as a snake issues from its slough. And as was the dead Hataska so was this form, feature for feature, look for look, and limb for limb. But still the corpse rested upon Osiris' knee, for this was but the Ka that ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
... with the cozoners: for so soone as I came beyond Eaton, they threw me off, from behinde one of them, in a slough of myre; and set spurres, and away; like ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... offhand manner. "Such an array of reasons cannot be gainsaid; and, indeed, I shouldn't feel comfortable in leaving you down here with no champion but little Spira, so let us be off at once. Head the van, you see, by crossing this Slough of Despond ...
— The Grateful Indian - And other Stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... a snail's pace; you may not have been with him on that occasion when, in his eagerness to be in time for the 'Flying Dutchman,' he arrives at Paddington an hour before it starts, and is put into the parliamentary train which is shunted at Slough to let the 'Dutchman' pass; but when you come to travel with him you know what 'nerves' are to your cost. On the other hand, this is the easiest kind of travelling companion to get rid of; for you have only to feign a sore throat, with ...
— Some Private Views • James Payn
... distant from Stoke lies the village of Slough, rendered famous by the residence of the celebrated astronomer, Sir William Herschel, and a short way further, on a gentle slope continued the whole way from Stoke, stand the venerable towers of time-honored ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... sometimes, as I shall think always, that we might have lived innocently and happily in New England, forgetting and forgotten by the rabble we left behind us, having shaken off the slough of an unhappy life, beginning the world again, under new names, in a new climate and country. It was a guilty dream to entertain, perhaps; but I shall dream it often enough in a strange land, among strange faces and strange manners—shall dream of you on ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... his holy name be us amang, What is this? for Saint James!—I may not well gang. I trust I be the same. Ah! my neck has lain wrang Enough Mickle thank, since yester-even Now, by Saint Stephen! I was flayed with a sweven,—[140] My heart out of slough.[141] I thought Gill began to croak, and travail full sad, Well nigh at the first cock,—of a young lad, For to mend our flock: then be I never glad. To have two on my rock,—more than ever I had. Ah, my head! A house full of young tharmes,[142] The devil knock ...
— Everyman and Other Old Religious Plays, with an Introduction • Anonymous
... of a body composed of very fine atoms (like those of Lucretius' "anima"), which inhabits the earthly body of the Christian like a kernel within its husk, and will one day (at the resurrection) slough off its muddy vesture of decay, and thenceforth exist in a form which can defy the ravages of time. Of the two views, Matthew Arnold's is much the truer, even though it should be proved that St. Paul sometimes pictures the "spiritual body" in the way described. ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... for by the fact that Davoust had found a marsh without a bridge, and completely encumbered with wagons. He had dragged them out of the slough in sight of the enemy, and so near them that their fires lighted his labors, and the sound of their drums mingled with that of his own voice. For the marshal and his generals could not yet resolve on abandoning to the enemy so many trophies; ...
— The Two Great Retreats of History • George Grote
... declaring that it had been a great treat. Larry kept the two drumsticks as well as the wings of the gobbler. Possibly he might many a time feel a queer little sensation creeping up and down his spinal column as memory carried him back again to that slough, where the treacherous black mud was slowly but surely ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... greater than my recent misery was the ecstasy which succeeded my liberation. The happy sense of relief imparted to me such a feeling of buoyancy that I was enabled to extricate myself from this 'slough of despond,' and I soon reached the swift current, when a few strokes landed me in security on ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... I; 'their shallow minds can hold no great ideas, and their light heads are carried away by trivialities that would not move a better-furnished skull; and their only alternative to such discourse is to plunge over head and ears into the slough of ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... prize. She shrank from meeting the friends who had so confidently expected her to win it, and her own thoughts were too painful to be left alone with. If Hinpoha had been wandering in the Desert of Waiting for the past few months, Migwan was sunk deep in the Slough of Despond. She was at the age when death seemed preferable to defeat, and she wished miserably that she would fall ill of some mortal disease, and never have to face the world again with failure written on her forehead. "Oh, why," she wailed in anguish of spirit, as has many an older ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at School • Hildegard G. Frey
... year the weather remained warm and the storm was later than usual, but more severe when it did come, driving thousands of water-fowl down with a rush from the mountain streams and lakes. There is a slough around a little plateau near the post, and for a week or more this was teeming with all kinds of ducks, until it was frozen over. Sometimes we would see several species quietly feeding together in the most friendly way. Faye and I would drive the horses down in ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe
... Heavy, coming out of her momentary slough of despond. "But we all have our little troubles, don't we, ...
— Ruth Fielding At College - or The Missing Examination Papers • Alice B. Emerson
... demands a delicacy of treatment which would have been thrown away upon the melodramatic subjects which Verdi had hitherto affected. Much of his music is really graceful and refined, but his efforts to avoid vulgarity occasionally land him in the slough of sentimentality. Nevertheless, the pathos which characterises some of the scenes has kept 'La Traviata' alive, though the opera is chiefly employed now as a means of allowing a popular prima donna to display her high notes and ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... Noyan, who had managed to make something out of our conversation, especially as the Puritan illustrated his knowledge by rudely tracing with a stumped forefinger a map on the board where he sat. "Sacre! 'tis the dirtiest red slough ever I navigated. Why not try the other thing? A brush with those gentlemen below would be more ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... he that, coming to a bend where the coombe suddenly widened, and the stream without warning cast its green fringe of alders like a slough and slipped down a beach of flat pebbles to the head waters of a tidal creek, Mr. Molesworth rubbed his eyes with a start. Had the stream been a Naiad she could not have given him the ...
— Merry-Garden and Other Stories • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... forth, Tuscany sank lower and lower in the slough. To please the Pope, havoc was made of the Leopoldine laws—named after the son of Maria Theresa, the wise Grand Duke Leopold I.—laws by which a bridle was put on the power and extension of the Church. The prosecution and imprisonment of a Protestant couple who were accused of wishing to make ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... means I owe to his wise care, 'Twas, "See the life that son of Albius leads! Observe that Barrus, vilest of ill weeds! Plain beacons these for heedless youth, whose taste Might lead them else a fair estate to waste:" If lawless love were what he bade me shun, "Avoid Scetanius' slough," his words would run: "Wise men," he'd add, "the reasons will explain Why you should follow this, from that refrain: For me, if I can train you in the ways Trod by the worthy folks of earlier days, And, while you need direction, ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... with! His mother's death—that wanton stupidity on the part of fate—and the shock it had somehow caused him, had first drawn him out of the slough of a cheap and facile pleasure on which he now looked back with contempt. Afterwards, his two years of travel, and the joys at once virile and pure they had brought with them, joys of adventure, bodily endurance, discovery, ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... keep, none the less. The stimulus and impetus and inspiration are not lost, and shall not be. No one has counted the youngsters he has hauled, by the scruff of the neck as often as not, out of a slough of middle-class mediocrity, and sent careering off into some welter or current of ideas and conjecture. Carl didn't know where they would end, and no more do any of the rest of us. He knew he loathed stagnation. And he stirred things and stirred people. And the end of ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... riding desperately by the side of his cousin, Lieutenant Thomas Crawford. For a time they kept to the road, and then turned across a swampy field, where they soon came to a wide slough of mire. They plunged their horses into the bog. Andrew struggled through, but when he reached the bank he found that his cousin's horse had fallen, and that Thomas was trying to fight off his pursuers with his sword. Andrew started back, but before he could get ...
— Historic Boyhoods • Rupert Sargent Holland
... blaze. But at night it had come on to rain in torrents, and all night long it had rained without cessation. We had a pair of very strong horses, but travelled at the rate of little more than a couple of miles an hour, through one unbroken slough of black mud and water. It had no variety but in depth. Now it was only half over the wheels, now it hid the axletree, and now the coach sank down in it almost to the windows. The air resounded in all directions with the loud chirping ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... bone splinters in conjunction with it; here, in spite of absence of all suppuration, the track may remain patent for many weeks. This may point to infection, but the tardiness in actual consolidation corresponds with what we are well acquainted with in the case of all aseptic wounds when a slough has to separate or become absorbed, and it is therefore only what might be reasonably expected when we remember that every such bullet track is lined by a thin ...
— Surgical Experiences in South Africa, 1899-1900 • George Henry Makins
... I repeat: There is no impure love. The impurity is in the mortal mind of man, obstructing his vision until he fails to see the purity of that which fain would lift him from the Slough of Despond to the ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... in getting to the stormy heart of this enraged and unhappy father, and portrayed in glowing colors the clearness of Miss Elizabeth's "effectual call" and "blessed hope," and managed to bridge over "that awful slough of Methodism" by descanting gravely upon some of the "mysterious leadings of sovereign grace." "And now, if our dear lamb of the Saviour can be rescued from those deluded people and carefully instructed in 'the doctrines of grace,' what an ornament she would be to our church with such a brilliant ...
— Elizabeth: The Disinherited Daugheter • E. Ben Ez-er
... misleading those who are already far misled, and of farther fanning passion, already kindled into flame. Doubtless, it served in its day, and, in greater or less degree, the end designed by it. Having done that, it has sunk into the general mass of stale and loathed calumnies. It is the very cast-off slough of a polluted and shameless press." And Mr Cooper observes—"Every honest man appears to admit that the press in America is fast getting to be intolerable. In escaping from the tyranny of foreign aristocrats, ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... Mantua territory half is slough, Half pine-tree forest: maples, scarlet oaks Breed o'er the river-beds; even Mincio chokes With sand the summer through: but 'tis morass In winter up to Mantua's walls. There was, Some thirty years before this evening's coil, One spot reclaimed from the surrounding spoil, Goito; ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... the swamps, by his timid companions, He prayed to the Virgin on high, and she led him forth from the forest; For angels she sent him as men— in the forms of the tawny Dakotas, And they led his feet from the fen, from the slough of despond and the desert, Half dead in a dismal morass, as they followed the red-deer they found him, In the midst of the mire and the grass, and mumbling "Te Deum laudamus." "Unktomee[72]—Ho!" muttered the braves, for they deemed him the black Spider-Spirit That dwells ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... the Jerry of the gipsies, but a much more showy-looking personage. Jerry was no longer a gentleman of "three outs"—the difficulty would now have been to say what he was "without." Snakelike he had cast his slough, and rejoiced in new and brilliant investiture. His were "speaking garments, speaking pockets too." His linen was of the finest, his hose of the smartest. Gay rings glittered on his fingers; a crystal snuff-box underwent graceful manipulation; a handsome gold repeater was sometimes ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... as who should have learnt it more betterer? BUMBLE could hopen the heyes of them BOOTHSES, JOHN BURNSES, ancetterer. Snow? Is it me brings the snow, and the hice, and the peasoupy slushiness, Making the subbubs one slough? No! The Age is give over to gushiness. Parties as writes to the Papers is snivellers, yus, every one of 'em, Barring the few as cracks jokes, though I own as I can't see the fun of 'em. Look at "UCALEGON," now, him as writes to a cheap daily journal, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 10, 1891 • Various
... compared with another's, there being no medium between valuable and worthless. How many over-worked, under-paid men have we known in New York, really gifted with this inexplicable knack at writing, who, well commanded and justly compensated, lifted high and dry out of the slough of poor-devilism in which their powers were obscured and impaired, could almost have made the fortune of a newspaper! Some of these Reporters of Genius are mere children in all the arts by which men prosper. A Journalist of Genius would know their value, ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... It was noon, and his dinner hour. He and his old collie dog, General, were taking their leisure on the slope of Red Willow slough, while the horses, relieved of their bits and traces, were nibbling at the succulent roots of the grass over which ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... played, and the duke lost more. His mind was jaded. He floundered—he made desperate efforts, but plunged deeper in the slough. Feeling that, to regain his ground, each card must tell, he acted on each as if it must win, and the consequences of this insanity (for a gamester at such a crisis is really insane) were, ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... in my dream that just as they had come to an end of this talk, they drew near to a slough that was in the midst of the plain, and as they took no heed, they both fell in. The name of the slough was Despond. Here they lay for a time in the mud; and the load that Christian had on his back made him sink all ...
— The Pilgrim's Progress in Words of One Syllable • Mary Godolphin
... backgammon,[68] that you hawked, coursed, rode, shot with the bow. I omit the fact that for the sake of your boyish presence students of letters came hither from all parts; and that it was due to you as an individual that our nobility, anxious to shed the slough of Celtic speech, imbued itself now with the style of oratory, now with the measures of the Muse. And this specially kindled the love of the community[69] that you forbade those whom you had already made Latins[70] to ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... Turkey-pen Slough, 4 miles north of Arlington, is a terrace with steep banks on two sides, next to the river and to the slough. On this stood a village. Three house sites are plainly marked by the refuse around, and there may be others; vegetation is very dense. Mussel shells and burned stones are abundant, and many ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke
... beneath that gleam appears the horrid face of a withered old woman with fleshless fingers, ah, then! and we say it in the interests of young and pretty women, that woman is lost. She is at the mercy of the first man of her acquaintance who sees her in that Parisian slough. There is more than one street in Paris where such a meeting may lead to a frightful drama, a bloody drama of death and love, a drama ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... through which he has crossed. He agitates the necessity and practicability of social reform, but it must be through individual effort. Years ago he decided that society was in a low state, now he calls on all men to put their shoulders to the wheel and lift it out of the Slough of Despond, where it has been floundering to no purpose for so long. His investigations are aided by a keen shrewdness, that bespeaks the practical man, who knows where to find the vulnerable heel of circumstance, and ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... knew this, and, having no room in the rocky channel to turn and fire, drew rein at the crossways sharply, and plunged into the black ravine leading to the Wizard's Slough. "Is it so?" I said to myself, with brain and head cold as iron; "though the foul fiend come from the slough to save thee, thou ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... pilgrimage? For the pilgrimage was a task and a toil that took all the limbs and all the lungs and all the labours and all the endurances that the strongest and the bravest of men could bring to bear upon it. How did this complete cripple ever get through the Slough, and first up and then down the Hill Difficulty, and past all the lions, and over a thousand other obstacles and stumbling-blocks, till he arrived at mine host's so hospitable door? The first surprised sight we get of this so handicapped pilgrim is when Greatheart and Feeble-mind are ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... and rawhide, which were drawn by a single horse or ox, and carried a load of from 800 to 1,000 pounds. These vehicles were admirably adapted to the country, which was in a perfectly natural state, without roads of any kind, except the trail worn by the carts. They could easily pass over a slough that would obstruct any other forms of wheeled carriage, and one man could drive four or five of them, each being hitched behind the other. They were readily constructed on the border, by the unskilled half-breeds, where iron was unobtainable. This trade, with an occasional ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... of a knife. Like most nervous persons, her feelings were intense. Such condemnation, remorse, and utter despair as took hold of her: it could not be called repentance, for that has "A purpose of heart and endeavour after new obedience." She was in the Slough of Despond. The twilight had deepened into darkness, ...
— Divers Women • Pansy and Mrs. C.M. Livingston
... hours that his Grace of Ebury performed his most brilliant feat of statesmanship, and redeemed that local off-shoot of the Church of Christ over which he ruled from the political slough whereinto it had fallen. To him solely—by means of his daughter, that is to say (but in politics women do not count)—is due the fact that the Church of Jingalo still stands on its old established footing, and that her Bishops have a decisive ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... indeed to hear how ill you had been—and yet to be lifted into the hope, or rather certainty, of seeing you next week pleased us extremely of course, and the more that your note through Lady Lyell had thrown us backward into a slough of despond and made me sceptical as to your coming here ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... some way and then, while he was sitting in the train one day coming home, he overheard two men talking about turtles going up. Must have been two hotel men. Anyway, that gave Sam an idea and he started right in wading through Petersen's slough for turtles. Why, he pulled up barrels of them, and would you believe it, they sold in the city for real money! Sam went crazy—about as crazy as Mary Hagley got over her luck. And then along came rheumatism and knocked Sam flat, ...
— Green Valley • Katharine Reynolds
... happened that, at the very time of this chat between Madame Roussillon and Rene Alice was bandaging Long-Hair's wounded leg with strips of her apron. It was under some willows which overhung the bank of a narrow and shallow lagoon or slough, which in those days extended a mile or two back into the country on the farther side of the river. Alice and Jean went over in a pirogue to see if the water lilies, haunting a pond there, were yet beginning to bloom. They landed at a convenient spot some distance up ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... of all these schemes and methods to which I have already referred for helping humanity out of the slough, and making men happier, is that they underestimate the fact of sin. If a man comes to them and says, 'I have broken God's law. What am I to do? I have a power within me that impels me now to evil. How am I to get rid of it?' they have no ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... of the Normans are clearly indicated in Domesday Book,[5] to a position on the north of London, thus gradually severing its communications with the rest of England, so that neither men nor convoys of provisions could enter its walls. Placing camps at Slough, Edmonton, and Tottenham, William himself remained some distance to the rear of these last with the main body of the army, and it seems probable that the actual surrender of London took place at or near Little Berkhampstead, in Hertfordshire,[6] some four miles ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... wide around, entertained precisely the same opinion. It is not, therefore, surprising that two young men like Frank and Vernon should be well pleased with their quarters, or that, having so early gotten into the slough of love, they should daily continue to sink deeper into the mire. The young poet's lame leg, though not a very serious affair, was still sufficient to keep him for several days a close prisoner to the house; but if any one had ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... negroes in literature and religion." We cite these instances to show that the sacredness of slavery from discussion was a discovery of much later date. So also was the theory of its divine origin,—a theological slough in which, we are sorry to say, Northern men have shown themselves readiest to bemire themselves. It was when slave labor and slave breeding began to bring large and rapid profits, by the extension of cotton-culture consequent on the invention of Whitney's ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... and this is why some of the most characteristic of the artist's designs are to be found in his illustrations to the "Waverley Novels." In one of these he shows us the illustrious Dominie at the moment, when reaching over to gather a water-lily, he falls souse into the Slough of Lochend, in which he forthwith became bogged up to the middle, his plight drawing from him of course his favourite ejaculation of amazement. By the assistance of some women the luckless Dominie was extracted from his position, ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... beautiful location and its people were very ambitious. In fruitless effort to sustain its lead, the town had built a pier almost two miles in length to a slough navigable to ocean steamers. A single horse drew a flat car carrying passengers and freight. It was the nearest approach to a railroad in the state of California at the time of our arrival on that lovely ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... before they could recover their composure; in order to appreciate the humour of the sally it was necessary to know that Miss Vincent had "come a cropper" at the last meet of the Long Island Hunt Club, and been extricated from a slough several feet deep. ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... was soon kicked in disgrace from his noble and well-disciplined mind. He resolved, that, let it cost what it might in the shape of loss of time and trial of temper, he would leave no stone unturned, and spare no pains, to deliver his friend of yesterday from the slough into which he was plunging. How he might best work for this end occupied his thoughts as ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... splash, and the party with shrill cries sprang to their feet; the low cart was filling with water. They had left the canon and were crossing a slough; no one had remembered that it would be high tide. The girls, without an instant's hesitation, whipped their gowns up round their necks; but their feet were wet and their skirts draggled. They made light of it, however, as they did of everything, and drove up to ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... freed himself from all distractions; his pupils and concerts, his whole connection at Bath, were immediately renounced; he accepted the King's offer with alacrity, and after one or two changes settled permanently at Slough, ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... facilities for getting rid of trouble after a decent interval. Whilst a slow nature was imbibing a misfortune little by little, she had swallowed the whole agony of it at a draught and was brightening again. She could slough off a sadness and replace it by a hope as easily as a lizard renews a ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... find that the luck of the thirteen began right back at the time when Jan, motoring back from Uzhitze down the valley of the Morava, coming fastish round a corner, plumped right up to the axle in a slough of clinging wet sandy mud. The car almost shrugged its shoulders as it settled down, and would have said, if cars could speak, "Well, what are you going to do about that, eh?" It was about the 264th mud hole in which ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... to drag the horse forward. By this, Molly also was over hoofs in liquid mud. For a minute and more we heav'd and splashed: and all the while the dragoons, seeing our fix, were shouting and drawing nearer and nearer. But just as a brace of bullets splashed into the slough at our feet, we stagger'd to the harder slope, and were gaining on them again. So for twenty minutes along the spurs of the hills, we held on, the enemy falling back and hidden, every now and again, in the hollows—but always following: at the end of which ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... good memory for medical terms. Yes, he saw Carre's slough. He himself has the like on his posterior and on his heel; but the tear that trembles in the corner of his eye ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... his own straight running-iron, as it were, writing over again the brand he wished to change; but this was clumsy and apt to be detected, for the new wound would slough and look suspicious. A piece of red-hot hay wire or telegraph wire was a better tool, for this could be twisted into the shape of almost any registered brand, and it would so cunningly connect the edges of both that the whole mark would ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... zeal had not abated, and while Danvers lay stretched on the bank of the wide slough, O'Dwyer could be seen, not far distant, sunning himself like a contented dog at his ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... there any chance of my discarding this and getting out to-morrow?" He touched the handkerchief round his eyes. "It doesn't matter about the head bandages, but the eyes—can't I slough the wraps to-morrow? I feel scarcely any ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... woman, but a narrow thinker, a coarse feeler, and an egotist. The second was a Parisienne, externally refined—at heart, corrupt—without a creed, without a principle, without an affection: having penetrated the outward crust of decorum in this character, you found a slough beneath. She had a wonderful passion for presents; and, in this point, the third teacher—a person otherwise characterless and insignificant—closely resembled her. This last-named had also one other distinctive property—that of avarice. In her reigned the love of money for its own sake. ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... poun' an' six shillin' in my pocket an' a lot more hid in the bush. It's all yourn to the last round penny. I reckon it'll purty nigh bridge the slough. I want ye to be married respectable like a gentleman—slick duds, plenty o' cakes an' pies an' no slightin' the minister er the ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... to me, he seemed a bit of a coxcomb, personally. Poor fellow! to be sure, he had had a long seasoning of adversity, which is not so hard to bear as t'other thing. I hope that this won't throw him back into the 'slough of Despond.' ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... Clay began to slough the outward marks of his calling. He gave his spurs to Johnnie before he left the ranch. At Tucson he shed his chaps and left them in care of a friend at the Longhorn Corral. The six-gun with which he ...
— The Big-Town Round-Up • William MacLeod Raine
... led the Republican party to its duty and its mission, who overcame the numbers of the opposition, who lifted their associates from the slough of prejudice and led them out of the darkness of tradition, let there be all honor and praise. They gave hope to the hopeless, help to the helpless, liberty to the downtrodden. They did more: they elevated ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... women beautiful, Mr. Selwyn?' said Lady Durwent, trying to retrieve the conversation from the slough ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... Christ—was a greater sin than all the sins of David, Solomon, Manasseh, and even than all the sins that had been committed by all God's redeemed ones. Was there ever a man in the world so capable of describing the miseries of Doubting Castle, or of the Slough of Despond, as poor ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Street where we shook hands and parted and I turned up Monkey Hill. I had made unexpected progress with Trumbull that night. He had never talked to me so freely before and somehow he had let me come nearer to hun than I had ever hoped to be. His company had lifted me out of the slough a little and my mind was on a better footing as I neared ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... momentarily sorry at the double life he was leading. If it were possible to establish the death of the wastrel he was personating he would perhaps allow his "father" to live on in this new-found happiness; but if the real D.V.W. were alive some effort must be made to help him out of the slough—perhaps to bring him back. He would try to find out through ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... more unfair word don't exist. When we animals never drink only just enough to satisfy thirst, never eat except when we have genuine appetites, never indulge in any sort of debauch, and never strain excess till we sink into the slough of satiety, shall "animalism" be a word to designate all that men and women dare to do? "Animalism!" You ought to blush for such a libel on our innocent and reasonable lives when you regard your own! You men who scorch your throats with alcohols, ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... the Adriatic. The heavens opened, and to the accompaniment of thunder and lightning the rain descended in torrents, flooding the tents, quenching the illuminations, and reducing the whole ground to a Slough of Despond. The guests naturally rushed for shelter to the little inn, which was much too small to accommodate them. The police made for the barrels of beer, and were soon incapable of keeping order, and a mob of villagers who had assembled to witness the festivities ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... stands before the portal, bright With steel, his head and bust secured in mail, Like to a serpent, issued into light, Having cast off his slough, diseased and stale: Who more than ever joying in his might, Renewed in youth, and proud of polished scale, Darts his three tongues, fire flashing from his eyes; While every frighted beast before ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... Brighton and Hove, Bury, Calderdale, Darlington, Doncaster, Dudley, Gateshead, Halton, Hartlepool, Kirklees, Knowsley, Luton, Medway, Middlesbrough, Milton Keynes, North Tyneside, Oldham, Poole, Reading, Redcar and Cleveland, Rochdale, Rotherham, Sandwell, Sefton, Slough, Solihull, Southend-on-Sea, South Tyneside, St. Helens, Stockport, Stockton-on-Tees, Swindon, Tameside, Thurrock, Torbay, Trafford, Walsall, Warrington, Wigan, Wirral, Wolverhampton : counties: Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... upon him, half relenting; and at that he raised the stick that was in his hand and cruelly struck me on the face. "Lead on!" he cried again. "Must I be all day, catching my death in this vile slough, and all for ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to observe, how the appearance of characters will change, whilst the root that produces them remains the same. The Washington faction having waded through the slough of negociation, and whilst it amused France with professions of friendship contrived to injure her, immediately throws off the hypocrite, and assumes the swaggering air of a bravado. The party papers of that imbecile administration ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... regulated. Allow not thyself to be led away by pleasures; shun, like the plague, the foolish familiarities thou seest between some men and women; harmless enough at first, but which by insidious degrees corrupt the heart, and thence lead it to negligence, and then into the vile slough of vice. Credit me, the greatest safeguard to female chastity is sobriety of demeanour. I beseech and direct that thou often call to mind the friendship which was betwixt us; but I do not wish thee to mourn for me too much—an injunction which, so far as it is in my power, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... day went to Beaconsfield to view a house, and had a fly from Slough, a drive of several miles. The house was in the middle of the town, large and convenient, with good garden and paddock; the whole was offered us for $200 yearly; and we should have taken it, had it not been in such a dismantled condition ...
— Our Farm of Four Acres and the Money we Made by it • Miss Coulton
... you have ventured for the love of the country, form a sad quagmire. They are like John Bunyan's Slough of Despond, into which, as he observes, millions of cart-loads of good resolutions have been thrown, without perceptibly mending the way. From what you say, and from what I have heard from others, there is a very natural desire to trust to one or two empirical remedies, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... taking a favorite walk through the Presidio toward the Beach. From a hill-top they saw the Exposition buildings rising from what once had been a slough. ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... brilliant almost without a rival in its best passages, but these are comparatively few, and they are divided from one another by tracts of pathless desert. The narrative sometimes descends into a mere slough of barbarous names, a marish of fabulous genealogy, in which the lightest attention must take wings to be supported at all. For instance, the geographical and historical account of the Ten Tribes occupies a space equivalent to a modern octavo volume of at least four hundred pages, ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... be we faithful to ourselves: despise Nought but the coward in us! That way lies The wisdom making passage through our slough. Am I not heard, my head to Earth shall bow; Like her, shall wait to see, and seeing wait. Philosophy is Life's one match for Fate. That photosphere of our high fountain One, Our spirit's Lord and Reason's ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... hundred miles northwest—Fort Union. After some delay at Santa Fe, the rebels, numbering some sixteen hundred, set out for Fort Union. At Apache Pass, or Pigeon's Ranch, they were met by a Colorado regiment, with what regulars and militia could be found, all under command of Colonel John P. Slough (afterwards chief justice of the Territory), and were defeated, their wagons, ammunition, and all their stores having been destroyed by a party of Union troops under Captain W. H. Lewis, Fifth United States Infantry, and Captain ...
— Frontier service during the rebellion - or, A history of Company K, First Infantry, California Volunteers • George H. Pettis
... as the many dull would meanly scorn and the few wise nobly envy. For him love comes like a mighty wind of fire and burns his heart clean. He may have been stained and spotted in the slough of life, but when the woman comes she ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... benefit Grady little; he was in the rear again at once, growling and bemoaning his lot; and at last, by some carelessness, not having followed properly in our tracks, stumbled into a deep part of the slough where it was mostly water, gave some very dreadful screams, and before we could come to his aid had sunk along with his booty. His fate, and above all these screams of his, appalled us to the soul; yet it was on the whole a fortunate circumstance, and the means of our deliverance, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... anything. She regards the revolt of her passions and her involuntary faults as terrible crimes, which draw upon her the hatred of her Beloved. She seeks to cleanse and to purify herself, but she is no sooner washed than she seems to fall into a slough yet more filthy and polluted than that from which she has just escaped. She does not see that it is because she runs that she contracts defilement, and falls so frequently, yet she is so ashamed to run in this condition, that she does not know where to hide herself. ...
— Spiritual Torrents • Jeanne Marie Bouvires de la Mot Guyon
... glanced at Billy Louise, guessed from her somber face that the villainous mood still held her, and sighed a little. He was not deeply concerned by her mood. He understood her too well to descend into any slough of despondence because she was cross. Then he remembered the reason she had given—the reason he had not believed at the time. They were down ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... down the river to the dredging work—Carlson insists I must advise him—and then up in to Sacramento, running over the Teal Slough land on the way, to see ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... their portion ere the night was done. They saw the corn that was their winter store to save their offspring from famine poured out like ditch-water. They saw oats and wheat flung down to be trodden into a slough of mud and filth. They saw the walnut presses in their kitchens broken open, and their old heirlooms of silver, centuries old, borne away as booty. They saw the oak cupboards in their wives' bed-chambers ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
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