"Welter" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with their evil, red-shot little eyes at the flames and the shapes of the hated men. The big bulls were bellowing, bucking their heads angrily, churning up the soft soil with their strong, dagger-spurred feet: the welter of noise and the sight of so many men had wrought them up into a vicious and ...
— Hawk Carse • Anthony Gilmore
... whole expanse Suddenly in the half-light of the dusk Glimmered and waned. The last rays of the sun Lit but the tops of trees and mountain-peaks With tarnished glory; and the water's sheen, Once blue and bright, grew lustreless, and soon A welter of red clouds alone betrayed The passing of the sun. The scattered isles Uprose, black-looming o'er the tranquil deeps, Where the reflected heavens wanly showed A lingering gleam. Already wood and hill Sank in obscurity. The river ...
— A Lute of Jade/Being Selections from the Classical Poets of China • L. Cranmer-Byng
... failure in the moral expurgation was deepened by a failure in the attempt to bring intellectual order into the welter of primitive gods. The only satisfactory end of that effort would have been monotheism. If Zeus had only gone further and become completely, once and for all, the father of all life, the scandalous stories would have lost their point and meaning. It is ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... of a Baptist college, this raucous tommyrot about death-warrants and ropes, this sawing of the air and chewing of the rag by people so d——d ignorant that they couldn't find either end of themselves in the dark, this chortling over the fact that one desk-emaciated welter-weight had been caught unawares and trampled upon by a sanctified mob—a refreshing sight, I say, in a temple consecrated to that Christ who forgave even his enemies from the cross. But every man at that meeting who said he never read the ICONOCLAST deliberately lied. The Baptists ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... occasion dear Compels me to disturb your season due: For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime, Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer: Who would not sing for Lycidas? he knew Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme. He must not float upon his watery bier Unwept, and welter to the parching wind, Without the meed of some ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... tremendous—and the word is used with its amplest significance—walls of slightly overhanging rock, through which aided by grinding boulders and scoring shingle, the river has widened as well as deepened its channel a little every century, while between the white welter at their feet lies a breadth of troubled green where the stream flows heaped up, as it were, ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... also "the moralist of the Main." The first book which brought him great popularity, 'The Innocents Abroad', exhibited qualities of serious ethical import which, while escaping the attention of the readers of that day, emerge for the moderns from the welter of hilarious humour. How unforgettable is his righteous indignation over that "benefit" ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... day, De Quincey, Wilson, Macaulay, and Carlyle set the fashion, it may possibly seem tame to those who are not satisfied with proportion in form and harmony in tint; it will certainly not seem so to those who are more fortunately gifted. Indeed, compared either with Wilson's welter of words, now bombastic, now gushing, now horse-playful, or with the endless and heartbreaking antitheses of what Brougham ill-naturedly but truly called "Tom's snip-snap," it is infinitely preferable. The conclusion of the ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... "Russian Ballet." He reflected upon an abstract question oddly disconnected with the violent welter of his sensations: "Can a man be a good practical architect who isn't able to sleep because he's seen a ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... of a non-partisan, then, that this chronicle of adventure in those crucial days of the early war is written. It is a welter of experiences and reactions which the future may use as another first-hand document in casting up its own conclusions. There is no careful culling out of just those episodes which support a particular theory, such as the total and complete ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... were asked to mention one especially striking item out of all that welter, I should think of many things—things having to do with vastness, with gigantic movements and mutations, with Niagara-like noises, with great bursts of flame suggesting fallen fragments from the sun itself—but ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... are to build from west to east, From Gihon to Olivet, Waters to lead and wells to clear, And the garden furrows to set. From the Sheep Gate to the Fish Gate Is a welter of mire and mess; And southward over the common lands 'Tis a ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... the ocean's wave To seek this shore; They left behind the coward slave To welter in his living grave;— With hearts unbent, and spirits brave, They sternly bore Such toils as meaner souls had quelled; But souls like these, such toils ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... of a boys' school in view. In fact, boxing was this young man's diversion, and the Coster on several occasions expressed great regret that writing and politics had robbed the ring of one who showed promise of being the cleverest welter-weight of his time. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... glittering in the sunlight, and smelt the fragrance of the rain-washed air, and thought to yourself, "Am I not ashamed to be lying in bed on such an evening as this?" and, leaping joyously to your feet, gone out into the garden and revelled in all that welter of life? If you have, then you can imagine for yourself the overpowering sensation which was then ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... a big smoker lifts skyward, rising like a sea-god from out of the welter of spume and churning white, on the giddy, toppling, overhanging and downfalling, precarious crest appears the dark head of a man. Swiftly he rises through the rushing white. His black shoulders, his chest, his loins, his limbs—all is abruptly projected on one's vision. Where but the ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... and this has resulted in a kind of deformity of the national soul. It was a strange irony that even the aristocracy should end by falling victim to its own environment. Exploited by miracle-mongers, thrown off its balance by paroxysms of so-called mysticism, it disappeared from view in a welter of practices and beliefs that were perverse and childish ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... of blood: think that His bed was the hard knotty tree, and instead of a pillow He had a crown of thorns. And say then, with sore sighing, till thy desire cool, "My dear-worthy Lord hanged on the Rood for me; and I lie in this soft bed, and welter me in sin, like a foul swine that loves but filth." Rise then quickly, and hold thee with prayers, love-sighings and tears. Of three points beware. The first, that the devotions thou hast through grace stirring, be not ...
— The Form of Perfect Living and Other Prose Treatises • Richard Rolle of Hampole
... are, villages in their thinking, cut off from the great common or national thinking, Mr. Burleson commits a wrong against the unity, the single-heartedness and great-mindedness of a great people struggling to think together and to act together in the welter of our modern world, the ...
— The Ghost in the White House • Gerald Stanley Lee
... interesting personalities in the history of the English monarchy. We see EDWARD as a young man, wild, reckless and brutal; then, grown to his full powers and sobered by responsibility, making by sheer force of character something abiding and coherent out of the strange welter of warring factions from which Great Britain emerged as a united kingdom. Wales was a hot-bed of rebellion, Scotland the "plague-spot of the North," the Cinque Ports on the verge of going over to France. Only a strong ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 26, 1916 • Various
... pathway shakes and trembles. Brutes, in hungry anger raving, Prowl from dens, and caves, and caverns, Mingle with the ghosts and spectres, Lusting for a bloody surfeit. Reptiles, subtle and obnoxious, Crawl, and welter, and recoil them On the path in slimy matters, Reeking with a poisoned odor, Darting poisons to molest him. Arrows from the towers are flying, Shafts of flame and showers of fire, Sweeping on through clouds ...
— A Leaf from the Old Forest • J. D. Cossar
... it, the sacrifice. I'm very unhappy tonight, darling mother, and selfishly crying out to you. I feel almost like leaving Bernd, and starting for Glion tomorrow. And then when I think of him without me—He's as spiritually alone in this welter as I am. I'm the only one he has, the only human being who understands. Today he said, holding me in his arms—you should see how we cling to each other now as if we were drowning—"When this is over, ...
— Christine • Alice Cholmondeley
... line that needs no answer to express my congratulations on President Wilson's address. I can't express adequately all that I feel. Great gratitude and great hope are in my heart. I hope now that some great and abiding good to the world will yet be wrought out of all this welter of evil. Recent events in Russia, too, stimulate this hope: they are a good in themselves, but not the power for good in this war that a great and firmly established free country like the United States can be. The President's ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... the express from Miami. He was thinking that this was too good to be true. His brain had been in something of a whirl these last few days, but this was one thought that never failed to emerge clearly from the welter. ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... somewhat difficult, in telling this narrative, to arrange the minor incidents of my story in their proper sequence. I am writing by the light of an imperfect memory; and the work is complicated by the fact that the early days of my sojourn at Sanstead House are a blur, a confused welter like a Futurist picture, from which emerge haphazard the figures of boys—boys working, boys eating, boys playing football, boys whispering, shouting, asking questions, banging doors, jumping on beds, and clattering upstairs and along passages, the whole ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... Smoke was descending gradually widened after the fashion of any normal valley; but, at the lower end, it pinched narrowly between high precipitous walls and abruptly stopped in a cross wall. At the base of this, in a welter of broken rock, the streamlet disappeared, evidently finding its way out underground. Climbing the cross wall, from the top Smoke saw the lake beneath him. Unlike any mountain lake he had ever seen, it was not blue. Instead, its intense peacock-green tokened its ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... feet. To his irritated vision the opposite wall seemed to heave and bulge forward, its chocolate design to become distended and to burst, spreading itself in blotches on the yellow ochre. On the face of the hideous welter swam the face of Mr. Soper, as ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... to come there many times a day to wash or to draw water, and the welter of foot-prints in the sand gave no clue. Finally Joe, with a cry, pounced on a dark object at the water's edge and held it up. It was Sam's ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... inboard and filled the space forward of the break of the main-deck. The swirling water touched the sides of the long-boat and then receded when the stricken schooner struggled up from the welter. A scuttle-butt was torn from its lashings and went by the board, ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... knew, had been given, in a less kind shape, by Necessity itself; and had sent Polish Majesty, and his Bruhls and "powerful people," bodily home, and out of that Polish Russian welter, in a headlong and tragically passionate condition. Electoral Princess, next time she writes, is become Electress ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... the political situation into a worse chaos than had ever been reached during the Civil wars. For several months it was not at all plain how things were tending, or what fresh combinations were to rise out of the welter in which a vacillating and incapable senate formed the only constitutional rallying-point. In spite of all his long-cherished delusions, Cicero must have known that this way no hope lay; when at last he flung himself into the conflict, and broke away from his literary seclusion ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... plunge; bathe &c.(water) 337. submerge, submerse; immerse; douse, sink, engulf, send to the bottom. get out of one's depth; go to the bottom, go down like a stone, drop like a lead balloon; founder, welter, wallow. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... firm of publishers, Oakley and Dalbiac. It is my intention to speak of my books as little as possible in this history. I must, however, explain that six months before my aunt's death I had already written my first novel, The Jest, and sent it to precisely Oakley and Dalbiac. It was a wild welter of youthful extravagances, and it aimed to depict London society, of which I knew nothing whatever, with a flippant and cynical pen. Oakley and Dalbiac had kept silence for several months, and had then stated, in an extremely formal epistle, that they thought the book might have some chance ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... sake," cried Blaise, staring into the welter below, "give me something in my bare hand. Rats, he called us, rats, and I won't die like a rat, I won't, I won't." It was the cry of primitive nature and the Dauphin ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... It discusses sex-problems with unusual candour ... it gives a vivid picture of Russian life ... and it reflects the welter of thoughts and aspirations which are common to the ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... rushed on the rocks at Fort Point, pounded there a brief second, and was hurled by the following sea on to the beach, so nearly high and dry that her crew, by the aid of lines, were readily saved. And then into view through the welter came staggering a new boat, one whose first trip it was, sore battered, but battling gallantly for life, and making wonderful weather of it. Yet, even as hope told the flattering tale of her certain safety, there came racing up astern a sea, gigantic even ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... are introducing complexity, very largely by selection and combination of simple elements evolved in former times to fit earlier conditions. Whether organic relations can be established among these elements, so that there shall one day issue from the welter something well-rounded, something American, fitting American conditions and leading American aspirations forward and upward, is yet on the knees of the gods. We, the men and women of America, and ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick
... into the surf. He was playing that he was a sea-horse, now, and enjoying it selfishly, without a thought of poor me in the horrid, tottery little box that would be knocked over by a big wave, maybe, in another instant, in a welter of sand and salt water, under a merry ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... demi-gods listened, however, to no low tongues of ours, even when we pointed silently to their feet of clay. Perhaps we, as folk of simpler soul and more primitive type, have been most struck in the welter of recent years by the utter failure of white religion. We have curled our lips in something like contempt as we have witnessed glib apology and weary explanation. Nothing of the sort deceived us. A nation's religion is its life, and as such white ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... no desire whatever to be ejected from this snug nest into the welter of the wet and friendless world, puffed at his cigar, and looked at his host with the irresistible drollery ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... civil litigation respecting the division of the assets of the old partnership, broken down into a welter of complaints and countercomplaints, dragged on until 1852. No document reporting the precise terms of the final settlement was discovered, although the affair was obviously compromised on some basis, as the surviving records do speak of a division of the stock in New York City and at St. Louis. ...
— History of the Comstock Patent Medicine Business and Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills • Robert B. Shaw
... needle slid into his arm. Giving in. A dizzying welter of thoughts spun suddenly in his mind. Briscoe. Raynor One and Raynor Three. The net between the stars. Ringg, Vorongil, Meta, ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... to tell us of all the welter of loan-mongering, rococo constitution-tinkering, Confucianism, and genuine if at times misdirected philanthropy, which is now seething ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... wyte to stay you Your sorrowful journey, when on the sea row'dye; Then when the ocean-stream ye with your arms deck'd, Meted the mere-streets, there your hands brandish'd! O'er the Spearman ye glided; the sea with waves welter'd, The surge of the winter. Ye twain in the waves' might For a seven nights swink'd. He outdid thee in swimming, And the more was his might; but him in the morn-tide To the Heatho-Remes' land the holm bore ashore, And ...
— The Translations of Beowulf - A Critical Biography • Chauncey Brewster Tinker
... corner of the tarpaulin for the Doctor to pass in. A pack of ravening wolves tussling over an unusually small baby might distantly reproduce the scene Saxham leaves behind him. The trestle-table and benches are upset, and men and benches, draughts and dominoes, welter in horrible confusion over the earthen floor, when the scandalised orderly-corporal rushes in to quell the riot, and thenceforward joins ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... gazing into the middle distance, an individual of dishevelled aspect sidled up, a vagrant of almost the maximum seediness, from whose midriff there protruded a trayful of a strange welter of collar-studs, shoe-laces, rubber rings, buttonhooks, and dying roosters. For some minutes he had been eyeing his lordship appraisingly from the edge of the kerb, and now, secure in the fact that there ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... never gets it, never. We give him execration, injustice; if we let him go with a word, it is never a gentle word, but a bitter epithet; and we wonder he is estranged, when he sees our amazing composure in an amazing welter of hypocrisy and deceit. There is, of course, the better side, the many thousands of Catholics and Protestants who sincerely aim at better things. But what has to be admitted is that most sincerely religious people adopt to the man of no established religion the same attitude ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... fellow—Parry—an Australian, a statistician and a sporting encyclopaedia. Ask him the grain output of Paraguay for 1903, or the English importation of sheetings into China for 1890, or at what weight Jimmy Britt fought Battling Nelson, or who was welter-weight champion of the United States in '68, and you'll get the correct answer with the automatic celerity of a slot-machine. And there's Andy, a stone- mason, has ideas on everything, a good chess-player; ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... and timeless he came, and she slipped off her seat to him, like one come back from the dead. He had sold his beast as quickly as he could. But all the business was not finished. He took her again through the hurtling welter of ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... Herod" bears witness to that. One must conceive the development of the Elizabethan age as something so rapid in its accessibility to new impressions and new manners and learning and modes of thought that for years the old and new subsisted side by side. Think of modern Japan, a welter of old faiths and crafts and ideals and inrushing Western civilization all mixed up and side by side in the strangest contrasts and you will understand what it was. The miracle plays stayed on beside Marlowe and Shakespeare till Puritanism frowned upon them. But when ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... and levied tribute, and established dominion of their own, and such still powerful viceroys as held their own, and offered a nominal allegiance to the Mogul line, the glory of the race of Tamerlane was dimmed indeed. It occurred to one man, watching all the welter of the Indian world, where Mussulman and Hindoo struggled for supremacy—it occurred to Dupleix that in this struggle lay the opportunity for some European power—for his European power—for France—to gain for herself, and for the daring adventurer ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... Penguin class had a method of his own for keeping that unmanageable bird traveling in a direct line, and every one was only too willing to give us the benefit of his experience. Finally, out of the welter of suggestions, one or two points became clear: it was important that one should give the machine full gas, and get the tail off the ground. Then, by skillful handling of the rudder, it might be kept traveling in the same general direction. But if, as usually happened, it showed willful tendencies, ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... add to the sense of urgency throbbing in Gefty's nerves, while events, and the equally hard necessity to avoid a fatally mistaken move in this welter of unknown factors, kept blocking him. Now the mysterious manner in which Maulbow's unpleasant traveling companion had appeared on the main deck made it impossible to do anything but keep Kerim at his side. If ...
— The Winds of Time • James H. Schmitz
... to Peter, at this moment of a whole welter of doubt and confusion and misunderstanding of people's motives and positions, to explain a great deal. Was that the reason why he'd been so happy in old Zachary Tan's shop years ago? Why he'd been happy through all that existence at the bookshop, those absurd unreal conspirators—happy, ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... ray of sun peering over the black cloud that illumined their faces to each other, while already the sharp peaked shadow of it had come between them. For that second, while he spoke, it seemed possible that, in the middle of welter and chaos and death and enmity, these two souls could stand apart, in the passionate serene of love, and the moment lasted for just as long as she flung herself into his arms. And then, even while her face was pressed to his, and while the riotous blood of their ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... any gratitude for it. Not that I'm ashamed of the performance. Perhaps if it had been anybody but Hicks, I should have waited for them to lower a boat. But Hicks had peculiar claims. You couldn't let a man you disliked so much welter round a great while. Where is the poor old fellow? Is he clothed and in his right ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... possession of an alien land, has behaved to its inhabitants with the disinterested zeal for their progress that our people have shown in the Philippines. To leave the islands at this time would mean that they would fall into a welter of murderous anarchy. Such desertion of duty on our part would be a crime against humanity. The character of Governor Taft and of his associates and subordinates is a proof, if such be needed, of the sincerity of our effort to give the islanders a constantly increasing measure of self-government, ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... impress poets, even those whom we have just quoted. Is this the only cause we can give, Shelley might ask, why the poet should not reverence his gift as something apart from himself and truly divine? If, after the fashion of modern psychology, we denote by the subconscious mind only the welter of myriad forgotten details of our daily life, what is there here to account for poesy? The remote, inaccessible chambers of our mind may, to be sure, be more replete with curious lumber than those continually swept and garnished for everyday use, yet, even so, there is nothing ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... Compels me to disturb your season due: For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer: Who would not sing for Lycidas? he knew Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme. He must not flote upon his watry bear Unwept, and welter to the parching wind, Without the meed of som melodious tear. Begin, then, Sisters of the sacred well, That from beneath the seat of Jove doth spring, Begin, and somwhat loudly sweep the string. Hence with denial vain, and coy excuse, So ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... interlude for American shipmasters, but France and England came to grips again in 1803. For two years thereafter the United States was almost the only important neutral nation not involved in the welter of conflict on land and sea, and trade everywhere sought the protection of the Stars and Stripes. England had swept her own rivals, men-of-war and merchantmen, from the face of the waters. France and Holland ceased ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... sail, as a wild fowl flings up its wing when shot, and lay tossing keel up, on the top of the waves. It all looked scarcely a stone's cast away, though it was vastly farther. A figure was seen to drag itself up out of the sea, and fall over into the boat, hovering and pitching in the surrounding welter, and struggling to get at two other figures clinging to the wreck. Suddenly the men in the boat pulled away, and Grace uttered a cry of despair and reproach: "Why, they're leaving ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... bitter- sounding adaptation, "Germania rules t'e waves," where the flag of a World-Power floated for the world to see. And in oven-like cities of India there were men who looked out at the white sun-glare, the heat-baked dust, the welter of crowded streets, who listened to the unceasing chorus of harsh-throated crows, the strident creaking of cart- wheels, the buzz and drone of insect swarms and the rattle call of the tree lizards; men whose thoughts went hungrily to the cool grey skies and ...
— When William Came • Saki
... did some act against his clear conviction; the light that he walked by was obscure, but it was single. Now, when two people of any grit and spirit put their fortunes into one, there succeeds to this comparative certainty a huge welter of competing jurisdictions. It no longer matters so much how life appears to one; one must consult another: one, who may be strong, must not offend the other, who is weak. The only weak brother I am willing to consider ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... on one side alone the hill gave shelter, So vast that phalanx of unconquered men, 2435 And there the living in the blood did welter Of the dead and dying, which in that green glen, Like stifled torrents, made a plashy fen Under the feet—thus was the butchery waged While the sun clomb Heaven's eastern steep—but when 2440 It 'gan ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... four powers who were not directly concerned—Germany, France, Italy, and ourselves. If that proposal had been accepted actual controversy would have been settled with honor to everybody, and the whole of this terrible welter would have ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... race Awake to the divine and to the orders Of universal and harmonious life, All interfused with Universal love, Which love is God, lest blindness, atheism, Which sees no order, reason, no intent Beat down the race to welter in the mire When storms, and floods come. And the sons of God, The leaders of the race from age to age Are chosen for their separate work, each work Fits in the given order. All who suffer The martyrdom of thought, whether ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... with a pang that the hegira meant farewell, perhaps forever, to the chance of recovering her lost daughter Louise from this welter of Paris. How mysterious the ways of the Higher Power! Her beloved nephew the Chevalier, at least, was safe in the distant fortress to which the Count her husband had condemned him. Pray God Louise might be saved—, yes! and her foster-sister Henrietta, beloved of the ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon
... welter of slaughter around them, Fracasse's men were in something of the position that little Peterkin had enjoyed in the shell crater. They ate a breakfast of biscuits, washed down by water from their canteens. Trickles of sand from bullet ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... him, looked ahead, saw the mark of a shod hoof between two rocks. The hoof mark pointed toward the crossing. Lance, however, turned down another small depression where the soil lay bare and Coaley left clean imprints, trotted along it until a welter of rocks made bad footing for the horse, climbed out and went on level. Farther up the valley an abrupt curve in Squaw Creek barred his way with scraggly, thin willow growth that had winding cow trails running through it. Into one of these Lance turned, rode deep into ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... whole nation, with the same measure of courage and discipline which is now displayed in war, might achieve a far more perfect protection for what is good in national life than armies and navies can ever achieve, without demanding the carnage and waste and welter of brutality involved ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... wicked and messy. So he splashed—in his mother's face, in Emmie's face, in the fire. He pretty well splashed the fire out. Ten minutes before, the bedroom had been tidy, a thing of beauty. It was now naught but a wild welter of towels, socks, binders—peninsulas of clothes nearly ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... Roman, would be much more at home in each other's century, if they had the gift of tongues, than in most of those which have intervened. It is neither necessary nor possible to go deeply into the resemblance here [Footnote: Some words of Sir Leslie Stephen's may be given, however, describing the welter of religious opinions that prevailed at both epochs: 'The analogy between the present age and that which witnessed the introduction of Christianity is too striking to have been missed by very many observers. ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... this strange, sad welter of emotion deeper still in Alan Massey's heart lay the tragic conviction that he would never win Tony, that his own sins would somehow rise to strike at him like a snake out of the grass. He had lost faith in his luck, had lost it strangely enough when luck had laid at ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... Beauty I have mentioned has opened me to that receptiveness which is aware of subtlety and owns to sharp surprise. The thrill is of its very essence. It is unexpected. Out of the welter of prolific detail Nature here glories in, a delicate hint of wonder and surprise comes stealing. The change, of course, is in myself, not otherwise. And on the particular "crude" occasion I will briefly mention, it reached me from the most obvious and banal of conditions—the ...
— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood
... indeed; but I think, that, notwithstanding the Duke of Rutland's patronage, Mr. Crabbe must have written inordinately long sermons. It is strange how many good men do,—losing point and force and efficiency in a welter of words! If there is one rhetorical lesson which it behooves all theologic or academic professors to lay down and enforce, (if need be with the ferule,) it is this,—Be short. It is amazing the way in which good men lose themselves ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... the British and Prussian Turks will never see it—like the Bourbons, they learn not. Here is a typically military system, the work of "born fighters" which has gone down in welter before the assaults of much less military States, the chief of which, indeed, has grown up in what Captain von Herbert has called, with some contempt, "stagnant and enfeebling peace conditions," formed by the people whom the Turks regarded as quite unfit to be made into warriors; ...
— Peace Theories and the Balkan War • Norman Angell
... to-day. The growth of the material [p.117] interests of the world and of life has become a menace on a scale unknown in the previous history of civilisation. There is only one refuge in the midst of all this welter and chaos. That indestructible refuge is "an inner synthesis and spiritual elevation of life." It is this alone which can prevent the disintegration that is bound to follow in its absence. The petty human element ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... obviously nearing its eyrie—dropping lower and lower, losing speed and altitude; and also threatening each moment to tumble down out of control into the smothering welter of olive-green below, with a dead, unseen body ...
— Raiders Invisible • Desmond Winter Hall
... officers saw a high ledge of rocks, under shelter of which a few men could form up. Wolfe, directing every movement with his cane, like Gordon in China a century later, shouted to the others to follow them; and then, amid the crash of artillery and the wild welter of the surf, though many boats were smashed and others upset, though some men were shot and others drowned, the landing was securely made. 'Who were the first ashore?' asked Wolfe, as the men were forming up under the ledge. Two Highlanders were pointed out. 'Good ...
— The Winning of Canada: A Chronicle of Wolf • William Wood
... In the welter of evidence conflicting with apparent fact which was given before the commission and in the trials of the Great Oyer, in the mass of writing both contemporary and of later days round the Overbury mystery, it is hard indeed to land upon the truth. Feasible solution is to ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... this," he answered, picking up both the telegrams; "one of our groom fellows at home has a brother who knows everything about Blackmore's stable, and he has just wired to me that Dainty Dick will win the Flying Welter at Hurst Park to-day, and I was off to back it when I get a wire from my tipster, Tom Webb, that The Philosopher can't lose the same race. It is Tom's 'double nap' and I am in a hole ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... "The Dip," which connects the pools of the "Heathery Isle" and the "Red Craig," and which is now leased by that good fisherman, Mr. Justice North. I think the Dundurcas water then belonged to the late Mr. Little Gilmour, the well-known welter-weight who went so well to hounds season after season from Melton Mowbray, and who was as keen in the water on Spey as he was over the Leicestershire pastures. A servant of Mr. Little Gilmour was drowned in the "Two Stones" pool, the next below the "Holly Bush;" and the next ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... a stout heart, a clear head, and a sure hand, to hold his own in a welter of interests and antagonisms such as beset me. The eternal instinct in a full man is to get through, to achieve, to live, aye, and to love, thus making life a great, clamorous thing not a mere existence. So concluding, I took the first occasion by the hand, with what personal risk ...
— The Black Colonel • James Milne
... things—enough of nothing. She could sketch a little, play a little, sing a little, write a little. Also—and, as she remembered it, she felt for the first time a tremor of hope—she could use a typewriter reasonably well. That one accomplishment stood out in the welter of her thoughts, solid and comforting, like a rock in a quicksand. It was something definite, something marketable, something of value for which ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse
... home in better spirits than they had been in since that welter of gold had lain on the ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... herself backwards, with eyes dilated and a warmth in her cheeks, the rod bending above her, and the line ripping its way towards the welter at the head of the pool. There it curved inwards a trifle, and Alton ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... like hounds leaping up at their prey; and far beneath, the horrible confused battle-roar of that great leaguer of waves. He cannot see them, as he strains his eyes over the wall into the blank depth,—nothing but a confused welter and quiver of mingled air, and rain, and spray, as if the very atmosphere were writhing in the clutches of the gale: but he can hear,—what can he not hear? It would have needed a less vivid brain than Elsley's to fancy another Badajos beneath. There it all is:—the ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... apart in a welter of fragile springs and gears. The fact was of some deeper significance, Ludovick knew, but he was too numbed by his incredible success to be able to think clearly. All he knew was that The Belphin would be able to explain things ...
— The Blue Tower • Evelyn E. Smith
... welter of intrigue, of land speculation, and of more or less piratical aggression, there was immanent danger that the West would relapse into anarchy unless a firm government were established, and unless the boundaries with England and Spain were ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt
... description could not be a true one. It is easier for the ordinary reader to pass over the self contradictions, hardly even being aware of them, and grasp the underlying meaning: the trained logician is at once pulled up by the nonsensical form of the description and the meaning is lost in a welter of conflicting words. This, I think, is the real reason why some of the most brilliant intellectual thinkers have been able to make nothing of Bergson s philosophy: baffled by the self-contradictions into which he is necessarily driven in the attempt to convey his meaning they have hastily assumed ...
— The Misuse of Mind • Karin Stephen
... be by the feminist leaders, this is the first of questions; and in so far as any clear opinion on it is emerging from the welter of prejudices, that opinion is hitherto inimical to the feminist claims. Most notably is this the case in America, where the dysgenic consequences of the so-called higher education of women ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... from the tripod, can be more radiantly just to those from whom he differs; but then the tenor of his thoughts is even calumnious; while Athelred, slower to forge excuses, is yet slower to condemn, and sits over the welter of the world, vacillating but still judicial, and still faithfully contending with ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... at Tom-tom, which left the others simply standing in a field of forty-four at Kempton Park, and carrying eight-stone-seven. Here he has a paltry four-pound penalty for the Worcester Welter Handicap, yet one can have seven to one ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 7th, 1920 • Various
... had entered the room with a platter of doughnuts in his hand, and stood watching, his face going pale. Quite suddenly there was a crash, and the gang leader went down in a welter of porcelain and fried pastry. Willy Cameron was badly beaten up, in the end, and the beaters were court-martialed. But something of Lily's fine ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... found such well-known roarers as Boanerges and Hallelujah Sal—not much of a recommendation to anybody except Mr. JEREMY. His own performances are worse than contemptible. As a two-year old, he was placed second at eight stone to Candlestick in the Warmington Open Welter Handicap. After that he sprang a curb in the middle of his back, and the fools who train him actually brought him out to run in the All-aged Selling Plate at Ballymacwhacket. He won the race easily enough of course, but only an impostor, whose ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, May 3, 1890. • Various
... very great confloption, for, of course, that wild cat fought like a—like a wild cat, which is like a Welshman, and I cannot say more than that. And in the end the whole inferno, being upon a very sharp slope, began to slide, and slid, dragging a welter of dust and raw earth and feathers and fur after it, in an avalanche of its own, till it fetched up in a tangle of mountain-ash roots and furze two hundred feet below, where it furiously and fearfully, in one ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... "Rake's Progress" prints in the old inns were worth looking at—but this sentimental stuff—well, Victorianism had gone! "Tell them to hold on!" old Timothy had said. But to what were they to hold on in this modern welter of the "democratic principle"? Why, even privacy was threatened! And at the thought that privacy might perish, Soames pushed back his teacup and went to the window. Fancy owning no more of Nature than the crowd out there owned of the flowers and trees and waters of Hyde Park! ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... him, for she was staring with wide eyes out at the desolate welter of water and cloud, and thinking of home: the home that was, that used to be till such a little while ago, the home that now seemed to have been so amazingly, so unbelievably beautiful and blest, with its daily life of love and laughter and of easy confidence that to-morrow was going ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... lords vindicated their independence. The church was the only other body which profited by the strife; within its portals and its courts there was some law and order, some peace and refuge from the worldly welter; and it seized the opportunity to broaden its jurisdiction, magnify its law, exalt its privileges, and assert that to it belonged principally the right to elect and to depose sovereigns. Greater still would have been its services to civilization, had it been able to assert a power of putting ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard
... with O'Shanter, and sober me then with that builder of brick-kilnish dramas, rare Ben; snuff Herbert, as holy as a flower on a grave; with Fletcher wax tender, o'er Chapman grow brave; with Marlowe or Kyd take a fine poet-rave; in Very, most Hebrew of Saxons, find peace; with Lycidas welter on vext Irish seas; with Webster grow wild, and climb earthward again, down by mystical Browne's Jacob's-ladder-like brain, to that spiritual Pepys (Cotton's version) Montaigne; find a new depth in Wordsworth, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... himself up to an orgy of sentimentality. He seemed to be alone in the world which had paired itself off into a sort of seething welter of happy couples. Taxicabs full of happy couples rolled by every minute. Passing omnibuses creaked beneath the weight of happy couples. The very policeman across the Street had just grinned at a flitting shop girl, and she had smiled back at him. The only female in London who did not appear ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... sobbed, and she would have slipped off into the welter of angry foam beneath had not Hozier tightened a protecting arm round ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... and I was eight-and-thirty; plenty of money, sound in wind and limb. I had been by way of being a writer before the war, the hobby of a rich man; but if I picked up anything in the welter in France, it was that real work is the only salvation this mad world has to offer; so I meant to begin at the beginning, and learn my trade like a journeyman labourer. I had come to the right place. A very wonderful city is Peshawar—rather let ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... Some in the welter of this surging tide Move like the mystic lamps, the Spirits Seven, Their burning love runs kindling far and wide, That fire they needed not to steal from heaven, 'Twas a free gift flung down with them to bide, And be a comfort for the hearts bereaven, A warmth, a glow, to make the failing ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... points; outlines are blurred in an unpoetic haze. The history of Tacitus has been described as history 'seen by lightning flashes'. Such should be the history of historical epic. In its stead Silius presents us with a confused welter of archaistic battle, learned allusion, and ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... Then the vast welter of humanity dissolved and streamed hither and thither, gaping and laughing until night, when thousands poured into the red barn of the census shack and entered the artificial fairyland within. The President walked through, smiling; the ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... long story, and will bore you. To cut matters short, for we ought to be turning in, I got to Borkum—that's the first of the German islands.' He pointed at a round bare lozenge lying in the midst of a welter of sandbanks. 'Rottum—this queer little one—it has only one house on it—is the most easterly Dutch island, and the mainland of Holland ends here, opposite it, at the Ems River'—indicating a dismal cavity ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... difficulties: glimmering sandbars, reaches of moon-white shoals, patches of half-made land with pines struggling knee-deep in the tide; here and there a mile of mangroves, and delusive channels of blue water; beauty everywhere spreading out her sweeping laces of foam—a welter of a world still in its making, with no clear passages for any craft drawing more than a canoe. Loveliness everywhere—again the waving purple fans, and the heraldic fish, and the branching coral mysteriously making the world. Loveliness everywhere!—in fact a labyrinth of ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... muscle-ridged under the thin shirt. The cracked voice of Daddy John came from beyond the canvas hood and David's urgent cries filled the air. The mules, necks outstretched, almost squatting in the agony of their endeavor, held their ground, but could do no more. Bess and Ben began to plunge in a welter of slapping harness as the wheels ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... magnificence of Pandemonium; the ineffable welter of Chaos; proudly eminent over all like a tower, the colossal personality of Satan. The description of Paradise and the story of Creation, if making less demand on the poet's creative power, required greater resources of knowledge, and more consummate skill in combination. Nature must yield ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... plugged nickel against an English sovereign, she'll not be sedately and patiently dining at second-table and murmuring "Yes, me Lady" in that meek and obedient manner. But it fairly took my breath, the adroit and expeditious manner in which Struthers had that welter of luggage unstrapped and unbuckled and warped into place and things stowed away, even down to her ladyship's rather ridiculous folding canvas bathtub. In little more than two shakes she had a shimmering litter of toilet things ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... that had started the delusion! "And Abraham said unto God: 'Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?'" Formerly the gods had meant might, but man's soul had come to crave for right. From the welter of human existence man had abstracted the idea of goodness and made a god of it, and then foolishly turned round and asked why it permitted the bad without which the idea of it could never have been formed. ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... runs the grave risk of seeming to abstract a single motive—the desire for wealth—from the confused welter of human impulses and to make it dominant at the expense of human nature itself. A hasty reading of Adam Smith would, indeed, confirm that impression; and that is perhaps why he seemed to Ruskin to blaspheme human nature. ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski
... considered, still less is there any question of inferiority or superiority. The Irish difficulty, historically considered, arises in the main from two circumstances. The first of these, to which I have just referred, is that when England began to intervene in the welter of Irish inter-tribal warfare, she was already an organised State, slowly working its way through feudal monarchy to constitutional freedom. The second is that while the religious revolution of the sixteenth century profoundly ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... road and had time to think, I knew that my half-formed intention was a sort of martyrdom; I was going to renounce myself in a fine welter of tears and then go staggering off into the setting sun to die of my mental wounds. I took careful stock of myself and faced the fact that my half-baked idea was a sort of suicide-wish; walking into any Mekstrom way station now was just ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... red" fashioned by his own hands and giving way at the seams, to a complete absence of dessous, under the strain of too fine a figure: this too though I make out in those connections, that is in the twilight of Hunt and De Peyster garrets, our command of a comparative welter of draperies; so that I am reduced to the surmise that ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... My mind has been so tumbled up and down this autumn that I am in a queer state of mingled melancholy and exaltation. You know how much I live in and for books. Well, I have a curious feeling, a kind of premonition that there are great books coming out of this welter of human hopes and anguishes, perhaps A book in which the tempest-shaken soul of the race will speak out as it never has before. The Bible, you know, is rather a disappointment: it has never done for humanity what it should have done. I wonder why? Walt Whitman is going to do a great deal, ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... he had instinctively picked out the lines of a set purpose from among the welter of promptings in his mind, he found it delayed ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... Each lip to move; but not a living soul Was there, save bold Ongolmo and the seer. The warrior half advanced his lifted spear, Then spoke: Dread master of the mighty lore! Say, shall the Spaniards welter in their gore? Let these dark ministers the answer tell, 100 Replied the master of the mighty spell. Then every giant-shadow, as it stood, Lifted on high a skull that dropped with blood. Yet more, the impatient warrior cried; yet more! Say, shall I live, and drink ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... Plainly, then, the cook had been a Chinaman; and, if so, who was Jos. Amalu? Or had Jos. stolen the chest before he proceeded to ship under a false name and domicile? It was possible, as anything was possible in such a welter; but, regarded as a solution, it only led and left me deeper in the bog. For why should this chest have been deserted and neglected, when the others were rummaged or removed? and where had Jos. come by that second chest, with which (according ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... an overt or covert Hindu ascendancy. Some may say that it would be an equally evil day for the British Raj if the Mahomedans came to believe in the futility of unrequited loyalty and joined hands with its enemies in the confident anticipation that, whatever welter might follow the collapse of British rule, they could not fail sooner or later to fight their way once more to the front. Certainly at no time since we have ruled India has greater circumspection been needed in holding the balance between the two communities. ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... fight like a welter-weight cinnamon bear; but, at last, we got him down in the bottom of the buggy and drove away. We took him up to the cave, and I hitched the horse in the cedar brake. After dark I drove the buggy to the little village, three miles away, where we had hired it, and ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... They were murdered invariably in one room at Machecoul. The marshal used to bathe in their blood; he was fond of making Gilles do Sill, Pontou, or Henriet torture them, and he experienced intense pleasure in seeing them in their agonies. But his great passion was to welter in their blood. His servants would stab a child in the jugular vein, and let the blood squirt over him. The room was often steeped in blood. When the horrible deed was done, and the child was dead, the marshal would be filled with grief for what he had done, and would toss weeping and praying ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... to this if we picture Captain Harley H. Christie pushing his way about the welter of wreckage in a barrel, reorganizing some 800 of his men, who were floating about on every conceivable sort of object, into the disciplined unit that they had comprised before they were ordered overside to take their chances in the ocean. Or again, taking the ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry
... ever reach. For green hills he must have opal-hued bergs—for green fields the outspread slaty waters, rolling in the delight of their few weeks of glorious freedom, and mocking the unwieldy ice-giants that rush in wind-driven troops across their plains, or welter captive in the weary swell, and melt away beneath ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... upon a certain unconstitutional act of Tamasese, the discontent took life and fire. The act was of his own conception; the dull dog was ambitious. Brandeis declares he would not be dissuaded; perhaps his adviser did not seriously try, perhaps did not dream that in that welter of contradictions, the Samoan constitution, any one point would be considered sacred. I have told how Tamasese assumed the title of Tuiatua. In August 1888 a year after his installation, he took a more formidable step and assumed that ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... be turned into a bear garden on account of this exploded superstition of Christmas is one of the anomalies of modern civilization. Look at this insensate welter of fools travelling in wild herds to disgusting ...
— A Christmas Mystery - The Story of Three Wise Men • William J. Locke
... perilously off again into the welter. That same evening three of my steamer companions were thrown out of a rickety taxi into a hole in the ground in the middle of New York, with the result that one of them spent a week in a hotel bed, under doctor and nurse. But I went scatheless. Such are the hazards of life.... We arrived ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... Light? Who is there that shall tell The purport of the tribe of Israel?— In the wild welter of races on that earth Which spins in space where thousand other spin— The casual offspring of the Cosmic Mirth Perhaps—what is there any man can win, Or any nation? Ultimates aside, Men have their aims, and Israel her pride. She stands among the rest, austere, aloof, ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... sun set on that welter of blood, not a single Saracen was left, and those of the Frankish rearguard who still lived ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... his car. He didn't question the patrolman; he hardly even heard him. His mind raced in a welter of confusion, trying desperately to refute the brilliant picture in his mind from that split-second that the spotlight had rested on the driver of the black car, trying to fit the impossible pieces into their ...
— Infinite Intruder • Alan Edward Nourse
... Lancelot, with a groan; "O King!"—and when he paused, methought I spied A dying fire of madness in his eyes— "O King, my friend, if friend of thine I be, Happier are those that welter in their sin, Swine in the mud, that cannot see for slime, Slime of the ditch: but in me lived a sin So strange, of such a kind, that all of pure, Noble, and knightly in me twined and clung Round that one sin, until ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... goin' to put a seat on the Stock Exchange in my stockin' my next birthday. But it all sounds like a lemon to me. What I like is golf and yachtin' and—er—well, say a corkin' fast ten-round bout between welter-weights with walkin' gloves." ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... as atmosphere and zone Of Thy loving heart alone. Man, who walketh in a show, Sees before him, to and fro, Shadow and illusion go; All things flow and fluctuate, Now contract and now dilate. In the welter of this sea, Nothing stable is but Thee; In this whirl of swooning trance, Thou alone art permanence; All without Thee only seems, All beside is choice of dreams. Never yet in darkest mood Doubted I that Thou wast good, Nor mistook my will for fate, Pain of ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... foreseen—when drifting down the tide-river in the rain and darkness—once the supporting tension of Faircloth's presence removed, chaos would close in on her. It only waited due opportunity. That granted, as a tempest-driven sea it would submerge her. In the welter of the present, she clutched at the high dignities and distinctions of the past as at a lifebelt. Not vulgarly, in a spirit of self-aggrandizement; but in the simple interests of self-preservation, as a means of keeping endangered sanity afloat. For the distinctions and dignities ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... an element will assume—how long it will welter to and fro as a wild democracy, a wilder anarchy—what constitution and organization it will fashion for itself, and for what depends on it in the depths of time, is a subject for prophetic conjecture, wherein brightest ...
— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt
... to the same monotonous type; so that, except for name and cover, it is impossible to tell one magazine from another. Happily one or two—rari nantes in gurgito vasto—survive amid the democratic welter; and all who have at heart not only the interests of literature, but the true interests of the public taste, will pray that they will have the courage to maintain their distinction, unseduced by the moneyed voice of the mob—a distinction ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... the creative artist is to turn chaos into cosmos. He has the welter of raw material around him; the shaping instinct crystallizes it into coherent forms. For that intellect is indispensable, and almost from the beginning Haydn's intellect was at work slowly building his folk-music into definite forms easily ...
— Haydn • John F. Runciman
... egoism, of alcohol, of fornication, we must not acknowledge; nay, we must resist unto death their malign influence and power. But alas, what are we doing to-day? Instead of looking up to the pure and lofty souls of Europe for guidance, we welter in the mud with the lowest and most degenerate. We are beginning to know and appreciate English whiskey, but not English freedom; we know the French grisettes, but not the French sages; we guzzle German beer, but of German wisdom ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... welter of his thoughts one course became clearer and clearer. He must tell Elaine. He must put her in possession of the main facts of the situation which had developed in Larssen's office. That he could tell her without violating the spirit of his bargain with Olive was certain. ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... hair, rose nobly above all the others, as a mosque rises above a crowd of prostrate worshippers at prayer. For background, there was a clump of trees; for here, in the far southern desert, just outside a waving welter of dunes, lay a region of dayas, where a wilderness of sand and tumbled stones was brightened by green hollows ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... Head Master was murmuring, "That's the nephew of John Verney. Of course you know him?" And the Field Marshal nodded. And then he looked at John, as John had seen him look at Lawrence, with the same flare of recognition in the steel-grey eyes. Out of the confused welter of faces shone that pair of eyes—twin beacons flashing their message of encouragement and salvation to a fellow-creature in peril—at least, so John interpreted that piercing glance. It seemed to say, far plainer than words, "I have stood alone as you stand; I have ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... of the worst would be a drop out of the sea; there would remain an immeasurable welter of badness, of which we are now happily ignorant, and from which we are safe, as long as our minds are not turned to ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... at the rancher's daughter. What had happened? She was the same, yet not the same. Her eyes were awaiting his. They did not flinch. They were wells of light; a strange new light; depth of light. Had the veil lifted at last? The welter of sullen anger subsided within him. The wrapped mystery of the mountain twilight hushed speech. What folly it all was—that far off clamor of greed in the Outer World, that wolfish war of self-interest down in the Valley, that clack of the wordsters ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... asked herself, hearing a man inquire, with great determination, for her number. The unfamiliar voice now asked for Miss Hilbery. Out of all the welter of voices which crowd round the far end of the telephone, out of the enormous range of possibilities, whose voice, what possibility, was this? A pause gave her time to ask herself this question. It was ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... having been published in the United States early in the year made it difficult to delay its appearance in England any longer. It came out in the thirteenth month of the war, and my conscience was troubled by the awful incongruity of throwing this bit of imagined drama into the welter of reality, tragic enough in all conscience but even more cruel than tragic and more inspiring than cruel. It seemed awfully presumptuous to think there would be eyes to spare for those pages in a community which in the crash of the big guns and in the din of brave words expressing ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... the old world is smashed. I have traversed the ruins; and my feet are still dirty with mud and blood. But I can tell you what is going to come out of that welter of ruin. There will come a sane and righteous hatred of militarism. What will be surely destroyed is Caesarism. Prophecy? This is not prophecy; I am stating an assured fact. Even at this hour of hysterical and relentless warfare there lies deep in the heart of the democracy of Europe a consuming ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... collection of jagged rocks, exposed at low tide. Under the incessant flashes their black heads appeared and disappeared in a welter of frothy white. It was an ominous spectacle for the ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... the Conqueror. The artificial mound on which the Round Tower stands may or may not be pre-historic. The slopes of the hill were inhabited, like nearly all our English sites, by the Romans, and by the savages before and after the Romans; but the welter of the Saxon dark ages did not use this abrupt elevation for a stronghold. What military reasoning led William of Falaise to discern it at once and ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... out on the hard dirt road with a pleasant song of hoofs: "Ta ta ta rat! Ta ta ta rat!" It was early and fresh, the air whistling, frost bright on the golden rod. As the sun warmed the world of stubble into a welter of yellow they turned from the highroad, through the bars of a farmer's gate, into a field, slowly bumping over the uneven earth. In a hollow of the rolling prairie they lost sight even of the country road. It was warm and placid. Locusts ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... of German biographies in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Who reads every word of these ten volumes? Who cares to know how big was the belly of some court chamberlain, or who were the lovers of some unendurable Frau? What a welter of dull garbage! In what dust-heaps dost thou not smother us, Teufelsdroeckh! O, Thomas, Thomas, what Titania has bewitched thee with the head of Dryasdust on thy noble shoulders? Compare Friedrich with Cromwell. In the Life of the Puritan hero we have a great purpose, a ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... towards the door. He obeyed mechanically. The strength of that chant took hold of him, stirred him, emboldened him. The hall opened to him, a vast welter of fluttering ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... the whole framework of philosophical thought men have kept since the days of Plato and Aristotle, has no more essential permanence as a final expression of the human mind, than the Scottish Longer Catechism. Amidst the welter of modern thought, a philosophy long lost to men rises again into being, like some blind and almost formless embryo, that must presently develop sight, and form, and power, a philosophy in which this assumption is denied. [Footnote: The serious reader ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... his new wealth, had, like Kubla Khan in Xanadu, a stately pleasure dome decreed, and in this new architectural triumph, where water lilies and swans floated on the surface of a deep black pool, Warble restlessly tossed in a welter of golden cushions, changing ...
— Ptomaine Street • Carolyn Wells
... when Mr. Britling was called upon to pay for his general cheerful activity in lump sums of bitter sorrow. There were nights—and especially after seasons of exceptional excitement and nervous activity—when the reckoning would be presented and Mr. Britling would welter prostrate and groaning under a stormy sky of unhappiness—active insatiable unhappiness—a beating ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... astounding opening of an astounding letter, pages and pages, to Rosalie from Miss Salmon. Pages and pages, having the appearance, each one, of a battlefield or of a riot: a welter of thick, black underscores strewn about like coffins or like corpses, and a bristling pin-cushionful (black pins) of notes of exclamation leaping about like war-dancing Zulus or staggering about like drunken or like wounded men. A welter you had to pick your way through ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... rearing A welter of maimed face bashed in from some old wound, Garbles Max Stirner. His words knock each other like little wooden blocks. No one heeds him, And a lank boy with hair over his eyes Pounds upon the ...
— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... thousands of readers by the fire, pathos, fun, sweetness, and—dramatic animation of his stories, and by the nobility and lovableness of many of the characters drawn in them, are immeasurable, and will touch us and abide with us again when the welter of the present transition state has passed. His devotion to the drama injured his style as a novelist, and also led him to adopt a sort of staccato manner of construction and statement which sometimes makes us smile. But upon the ground proper ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... combat along the shore. Like phalanxes with walls of silver shields they followed each other swiftly and disappeared like a line of soldiers cut down in battle. The howling wind and moaning waves "were like laments for the vanquished hosts." This ceaseless welter of the elements became more awe-inspiring as another boat appeared in the distance like some fiery monster of the deep. It seemed the very spirit of the sullen storm. As it drew nearer we beheld a vast fortress besieged by ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... Amidst this welter of proposals and counter-proposals there emerged, sometime during 1852 a scheme, propounded by Mr. Bethell, of Westminster for constructing a railway connecting the existing line at Shrewsbury with Aberystwyth. It was to run by way of the Rea Valley, through ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine
... view I glimpsed of that dread Barrier, amid the tumult and welter of my passing. The breach was closed! Unbroken, majestic, the ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... have breath and she drew apart for a moment. Then, she kissed him again. And Lance, for the first time, listened and made sense out of the welter of hysterical sobbing words ...
— Next Door, Next World • Robert Donald Locke
... that crass ignorance of other men's minds they have so often displayed, that America meant to keep out of the war at all costs, or were merely careless of consequences so long as the immediate end was attained, is now immaterial. From the welter of Teutonic misdeeds and lies arises the vital, the soul-inspiring spectacle of a union of all democracies against the ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... some pet vice, that must be left behind for a year or more. I remember only one man who walked his deck with a springy step, and gave the first course of the passage in an elated voice. But he, as I learned afterwards, was leaving nothing behind him, except a welter of debts ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad |
