"Quagmire" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sat in her old rooms once more and wrote a letter to Traill. The return to them had for one moment surged back in a rushing flood of memories; but it did not overwhelm her. She threw herself into no quagmire of despair. Her eyes were tearless. All her actions were such as those of a person dazed with sleep. One hope she had in her heart which animated her, just as the hope of ultimate rest will give sluggish life to the person whose eyes ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... of the latter are aimlessness and impatience; and their misfortune—which is largely responsible for those faults—is that they are too soon allowed to plunge into the quagmire called by euphemism "society," and often whelmed in its sorry pleasures and petty ambitions—too soon, also, invested with the right to manage their own affairs and to choose their own associates, advisers, and even instructors; in a word, permitted to breathe ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... fortified by a long, dreary, thorn capped clay ditch, with sour red water oozing out at every yard; a broken gate leading into a straight wood ride, ragged with dead grasses and black with fallen leaves, the centre mashed into a quagmire by innumerable horsehoofs; some forty red coats and some four black; a sprinkling of young- farmers, resplendent in gold buttons and green; a pair of sleek drab stable-keepers, showing off horses for sale; the surgeon of the union, in Mackintosh and antigropelos; two holiday schoolboys ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... country sinking in this administrative quagmire was not conducive to the maintenance of confidence in its ruling classes can well be imagined. On all sides voices were uplifted, not merely against the Cabinet, whose members were assumed to be actuated by patriotic motives ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... women there are who can raise themselves above the quagmire of what we call love, and make themselves anything but playthings for men. Of almost all these royal and luxurious sinners it was the chief sin that in some phase of their lives they consented to be playthings without being wives. I have striven so hard to be ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... a long rambling speech, in which he pretended not to know what things are and what are not wonderful. The Boy Hunters young gentleman fell headlong into the quagmire of definitions, but the oldest sister, who had her own ideas ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... personality of infinite tact; and that he possessed. He was the kind of man everybody could like; that put everyone at ease; that was friendly and familiar in all sorts of society; so he could make that treacherous quagmire Rome stable enough to be his pied-a-terre. That done, he could stretch out his arms thence to the provinces, and begin to weld them into unity. For this was the second part and real aim of his work: to rouse up in the Empire a centripetalism, ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... to reminiscences of their native village. He joked, and her mind roved thoughtfully through her past. It seemed to her strangely like a quagmire uniformly strewn with hillocks, which were covered with poplars trembling in constant fear; with low firs, and with white birches straying between the hillocks. The birches grew slowly, and after standing for five years on the ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... is a most exquisitely picturesque, but difficult, route up the course of the Kinugawa, which seems almost as unknown to Japanese as to foreigners." There was a pure lemon-coloured sky above, and slush a foot deep below. A road, at this time a quagmire, intersected by a rapid stream, crossed in many places by planks, runs through the village. This stream is at once "lavatory" and "drinking fountain." People come back from their work, sit on the ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... rain, and the blackness of the night, till every gun had been towed into one of the batteries before the walls. The triumph was all the greater because the work grew, not easier, but harder as it progressed. The same route used twice became an impassable quagmire. So, when the last two hundred men had wallowed through, the whole ensnaring bog was seamed with a perfect maze of decoying death-trails snaking in and out of ...
— The Great Fortress - A Chronicle of Louisbourg 1720-1760 • William Wood
... a little for what he found. All the way from Balaclava his horse struggled knee-deep in mud: a very quagmire of black, sticky slush. Yet this was the great highway—the only road between the base of supply and an army engaged eight miles distant in an arduous siege. Along it the whole of the food, ammunition, and material had to be carried on pony-back, or in a few ponderous ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... woodland glades and soft green swards; the air was glorious and cool, for though the sun was powerful there was an abundance of shade. One drawback, however, a drawback sufficient to mar our happiness, was not denied us. Every mile or so we had to plunge through a quagmire, equal to the worst South African mudhole, which is saying a great deal. Much care had to be exercised to prevent the horses getting fairly bogged or breaking their legs, but all passed without an accident, though our condition at the end of the day was awful. We ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... to walk a little way along the right-hand path which they were about to take. Only a few yards further on I found myself sinking in a floating quagmire, from which I extricated myself with much difficulty but just in time for as I discovered afterwards by probing with a pole, the water beneath the matted reeds was deep. That night I questioned the guides upon the subject, but without result, ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... in San Francisco during the first week of January, 1854, that a certain quagmire in the roadway of Long Wharf had become impassable, and a plank was thrown over its dangerous depth. Indeed, so treacherous was the spot that it was alleged, on good authority, that a hastily embarking traveler had once hopelessly lost his portmanteau, and was fain to ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... forces came face to face again, Gonsalvo being forced by the exigencies of the campaign to encamp in a deplorable situation, a region of swamp, which had been converted by the incessant rains into a mere quagmire. The French occupied higher ground and were much more comfortably situated. But Gonsalvo refused to move. He was playing his old waiting game, knowing that the French dared not attack his intrenched camp, and that time would work steadily in ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... at the due rate, fiery men both of them; sweep poor Baronay away, MINUS the meal; who finds even his road blocked (bridge bursting into cannon-shot upon him, at one point), instead of bridge, a stream, or slow current of quagmire for him,—and is in imminent hazard. Ziethen's behavior was superlative (details of it unintelligible off the ground); and Baronay fled totally in wreck;—his own horse shot, and at the moment no other to be had; swam the quagmire, or swashed ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... his boots was the spy who had followed Mr. Richard Bartholomew East and was engaged by Montagne Lewis to interfere with any attempt the president of the H. & P. A. might make to pull his railroad out of the financial quagmire into which it was rapidly sinking, Tom would have preferred to have the spy not suspect that he had been identified after his fiasco of ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Locomotive - or, Two Miles a Minute on the Rails • Victor Appleton
... roads, and even now they are few and bad. The chief communication from town to town is usually an uneven track, which none attempts to keep up, with deep ruts, and palmetto growing on either side, and occasional pools of water. A day's rain makes it a quagmire, impassable for anything ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... adding more of the eloquent speeches delivered, because they throw light for English readers on the high degree of culture French literature has attained at Quebec. All, we are sure, will rejoice with us that, for the cause of letters, M. Frechette was timely rescued from the quagmire of political warfare ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... calm repose; I could not reckon minutes, hours, nor years, But rose at once, and bursted into tears; Then, like a fool, confused, sat down again, And thought upon the past with shame and pain; I raved at war and all its horrid cost, And glory's quagmire, where the brave are lost. On carnage, fire, and plunder, long I mused, And cursed the murdering weapons I ...
— May Day With The Muses • Robert Bloomfield
... found. The only solid foundation is, as in the case of the earth's crust, pretty near the surface of things; the deeper we try to go, the damper, darker, and altogether more uncongenial we find it. There is no quagmire of superstition into which we may not be easily lured if we once cut ourselves adrift from those superficial aspects of things, in which alone our nature ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... ourselves in the high road to La Palud, and likely to be soon indemnified by dinner and rest, for the joltings of the day; but our driver, instead of taking the proper direction, lost himself in a series of inextricable cross roads, which terminated in a quagmire. In this slough of despond the unfortunate patache, from which we had descended, might have stuck for ever, but for the assistance of two shepherds, as wild in their attire, and as civil, as Don Quixote's friendly goatherds. By dint of their exertions and those of the floundering ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... we rode on through the endless forest of palms, and waded through a quagmire at least eight miles in extent, where the green slime reached up to the saddle-flaps. On that day we came to a sluggish stream, bearing the name of "Aptikpangmakthlaingwainkyapaimpangkya" (The Place Where the Pots Were Struck When They Were About to Feast). There a punt ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... heart are a mystery to him; only rumour or fable knows what goes on within them. For, when you have passed the woods and the dense, tangled thickets, in the depths you come upon a great rampart of stumps, logs, and roots, defended by a quagmire, a thousand streams, and a net of overgrown weeds and ant-hills, nests of wasps and hornets, and coils of serpents. If by some superhuman valour you surmount even these barriers, farther on you will meet with still greater danger. At each step ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... she had wandered in a darkness so thick that she could not see her hand before her. She had lost her way and knew not whither she had strayed, and with every step she had been afraid of sinking into a quagmire or stumbling headlong into an abyss. Now some one had called to her not to go any farther, but to sit down and wait for the break of day. She was glad that she would not have to continue her perilous wanderings; now she sat quietly waiting for ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... "Wartah"precipice, quagmire, quicksand and hence sundry secondary and metaphorical significations, under which, as in the "Semitic" (Arabic) tongues generally, the prosaical and material sense of the word is clearly evident. I noted this in Pilgrimage iii. 66 and was soundly abused ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... only in fine weather that the whole breadth of the road was available for wheeled vehicles. Often the mud lay deep on the right and the left; and only a narrow track of firm ground rose above the quagmire. [135] At such times obstructions and quarrels were frequent, and the path was sometimes blocked up during a long time by carriers, neither of whom would break the way. It happened, almost every day, that coaches ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... you that some half-dozen questions are necessary before we wade deeper into this quagmire. Where shall we go ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... down his pickets and branches and hurried through the birch grove into the dense fir woods, where he had not gone far before he discovered what was amiss. Up there was a big, treacherous marsh. A cow belonging to the Falla folk had gone down in a quagmire and Jan saw at once that it was the best cow they had on the farm, one for which Lars Gunnarson had been offered two hundred rix-dollars. She had sunk deep in the mire and was now so terrified that she lay quite still and sent forth only feeble and intermittant bellowings. It was plain that ...
— The Emperor of Portugalia • Selma Lagerlof
... something like the marshes of the coal-forests. All round about Norfolk the land is low, flat, and marshy, and to the south of the town, stretching far away into North Carolina, is a large, desolate swamp, no less than forty miles long and twenty-five broad. The whole place is one enormous quagmire, overgrown with water-plants and trees. The soil is as black as ink from the old, dead leaves, grasses, roots, and stems which lie in it; and so soft, that everything would sink into it, if it were not ...
— The Fairy-Land of Science • Arabella B. Buckley
... quagmire in the red clay of the road. It was an ancient trap left over from the rains of winter, strewn with twigs and small branches so that light wheels might skim, with luck, over its ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold
... soft mothering tones in her voice. "All the same we must keep our heads screwed on the right way. So, tell me, will it be of any personal advantage to you to help pull these elderly plungers out of the quagmire?" ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... situation had not made me grave. Till the campaign is ended, I shall be in no humour to smile. For the war, when it will be over, I have no idea. The peace is a jack o' lanthorn that dances before one's eyes, is never approached, and at best seems ready to lead some follies into a woful quagmire. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... into my lair, which kept me in constant fear of a ducking, and gave me anything but a peaceful night. This was, however, all forgotten the next morning, when the startling discovery was made that the river had fallen during the night and left me in a quagmire, from which it seemed at first impossible to ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... proved to be half-past two, and then, whether it snowed or rained, the traveller must rise and make ready, by the help of a horn-lantern and a farthing candle, and proceed on his way over bad roads, sometimes getting out to help the coachman lift the coach out of a quagmire or rut, and arrived in New York after a week's hard travelling, wondering at the ease as well as the expedition with which our journey ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... three or four feet below the surface. It also flowed over the Public Garden, across the southern portion of the parade-ground, to the foot of the hill, upon which stands the Soldiers' Monument. A son of H.G. Otis was drowned, about seventy years ago, in a quagmire which existed at that spot. It also flowed across the westerly portion of Boylston Street and Tremont Street, and Shawmut Avenue, to the corner of Washington Street and Groton Street, where stood the fortifications during the American Revolution, ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume I. No. VI. June, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... not certain as to the prevalence of this weed in the swampy places of the North-West, I can affirm that I have scarcely ever seen a very dangerous quagmire that has not been covered with this exquisite little plant; and if I could credit the stories of the nursery, I would be able to believe that those malignant fairies who live about dangerous springs and shaking swamps, cover the ground with these dainty sprays of green to lure ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... I not too truly, O my knights? Was I too dark a prophet when I said To those who went upon the Holy Quest, That most of them would follow wandering fires, Lost in the quagmire?—lost to me and gone, And left me gazing at a barren board, And a lean Order—scarce return'd a tithe - And out of those to whom the vision came My greatest hardly will believe he saw; Another hath beheld it afar off, And leaving ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... and her maid had, at Jarvis' suggestion, left them with the automobile in its latest quagmire, to reach the shelter of the inn. So it was that, as her vassal and his vassal struggled with the luggage in the dark, she reached the portal ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... to fit their saddles and packs to them. One very quiet animal was packed with some camp-kettles, coffee-pots, and other cooking traps. As soon as he was let loose and heard the tinware rattle he broke and ran, bringing up in a quagmire up to his sides. The saddle had turned, and his hind feet stepping into the pack well nigh ruined all ...
— In the Early Days along the Overland Trail in Nebraska Territory, in 1852 • Gilbert L. Cole
... communicated almost daily. I find from my letter-book that on the 21st of June I reported to him tersely and truly the condition of facts on that day: "This is the nineteenth day of rain, and the prospect of fair weather is as far off as ever. The roads are impassable; the fields and woods become quagmire's after a few wagons have crossed over. Yet we are at work all the time. The left flank is across Noonday Creek, and the right is across Nose's Creek. The enemy still holds Kenesaw, a conical mountain, with Marietta behind it, and has his flanks retired, to cover that town and the railroad ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... which he knew led up the hill to Woodbine Villa. But all landmarks were gone; houses, trees, hedges, all swept away; roads covered three feet thick with rocks, and stones, and bricks, and carcasses. The pleasant valley was one horrid quagmire, in which he could take few steps, burdened as he was, without sticking, or stumbling against some sure sign of destruction and death: within the compass of fifty yards he found a steam-boiler and its appurtenances (they must have weighed some tons, yet they had been driven ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... and mournful at taps, and finally ten-thirty came, by which time it had been raining torrents, and the wind was lashing the roaring river into foam, and the trees were bowing low before their master, and the levee road was a quagmire, and Cram felt convinced no cab could bring his subaltern home. Yet in his nervousness and anxiety he pulled on his boots, threw his gum coat over his uniform, tiptoed in to bend over Nell's sleeping form and whisper, ...
— Waring's Peril • Charles King
... agreed Rollo. "We once lost a fine brindle cow, because she wandered into a swamp and sank in a quagmire. But, hello—what is this?" As he spoke Rollo pulled from his coat pocket ...
— Rollo in Society - A Guide for Youth • George S. Chappell
... the best engineers had emphatically declared it would be impossible to cross. George Stephenson, however, had a plan for making the impossible possible. He simply floated his line on a broad bottom, like a ship, on the top of the quaking quagmire; and proceeded to lay down his rails on this seemingly fragile support without further scruple. It answered admirably, and still answers to the present day. The other works on the railway, especially the cuttings, were such as might well have appalled ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... fallen without interruption for several days, and now the track on which we were travelling could not, without poetical license, be described as a road. In some parts it resembled a water-course, in others a quagmire, and at least during the first half of the journey I was constantly reminded of that stage in the work of creation when the water was not yet separated from the dry land. During the few moments when the work of keeping my balance and preventing my baggage from ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... fit for duck and crocodile. Human should remember uncontrollable forces of nature and wait till winter come in due course, when quagmire bear ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... opened, and a light glimmered in a second window. Entering the courtyard, the britchka halted before a moderate-sized mansion. The darkness did not permit of very accurate observation being made, but, apparently, the windows only of one-half of the building were illuminated, while a quagmire in front of the door reflected the beams from the same. Meanwhile the rain continued to beat sonorously down upon the wooden roof, and could be heard trickling into a water butt; nor for a single moment did the dogs cease to bark with all the ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... on in that direction, but had only gone a few yards when the ground became a perfect quagmire of black loam, that looked like coal ground to powder, ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... the personages of his satire through "Every Man Out of His Humour," and "Cynthia's Revels," Daniel under the characters Fastidious Brisk and Hedon, Munday as Puntarvolo and Amorphus; but in these last we venture on quagmire once more. Jonson's literary rivalry of Daniel is traceable again and again, in the entertainments that welcomed King James on his way to London, in the masques at court, and in the pastoral drama. ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... during the day. Executions by hanging took place every day, but after the first horrible experience nothing would induce me to be a spectator. The rain, which had begun on the 3rd, continued almost without intermission, our camp becoming a quagmire, and the muggy, moist atmosphere increasing the ravages of ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths
... lies a vast swamp known as the Cienega de Zapata. It occupies an area of about seventy-five miles in length and about thirty miles in width, almost a dead flat, and practically at sea-level. Here and there are open spaces of water or clusters of trees, but most of it is bog and quagmire and dense mangrove thickets. Along the coast are numerous harbors, large and small, that are or, by dredging, could be made available for commercial purposes. Among these, on the north coast, from west ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... travel the road to distinction without finding it. They are well dressed, and would be modest, if modesty were worth its having in such an atmosphere. Indeed, they might have been taken for men with other motives than those of gaining office by wallowing in a political quagmire reeking with democratic filth. Courteous to each other, they sit at a large table containing long slips of paper, each candidate's sentiments printed thereon. As each voter—good fellow that he is—enters the room, one or the other candidate reaches out his hand to welcome him, and, ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... the following days converting our new trenches into a quagmire, the necessity for digging and cleaning up became all the more urgent, although it entailed a heavy strain upon the men under most uncomfortable conditions. As "B," "C" and "D" companies had each "had a stunt" and covered ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson
... echoed from every one. No powder could be found; the Norwegian having taken possession of the porter bottle, and placed it in his pocket, had doubtlessly fallen with it into the quagmire; and they had ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... benefit everyone else in the world than those Jesus Christ wished to be used for the conversion of the nations? And I would fain ask with regard to the great number of those who believe, and who thereby have withdrawn themselves from the quagmire of vices wherein before they were plunged, which would be the better: to have thus changed one's morals and reformed one's life, believing without examination that there are punishments for sin and rewards for good actions; ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... Ali-el-Gharbi, one hundred and eighty miles from Basrah. The ground was little better than a bog from the rain of the previous day; with very little rain the whole countryside seems to become a quagmire. The mud is about the most slippery kind to be found anywhere, so that walking is made most difficult. The first work was to unload the barges. All the kit, supplies, and tents had to be taken ashore as we were leaving the boats for ...
— With a Highland Regiment in Mesopotamia - 1916—1917 • Anonymous
... has likewise been restored, and holy mass and psalm now ascend daily from it. The wretched hovels around the gates, where miserable peasants herded like swine in their sties, have been cleared away, and places fit for human habitation have been erected in their stead. That fearful quagmire, in which so many wretched travellers have lost their lives, has been drained, and a causeway built across it. Basildene is becoming a blessing to all around it; and so long as thou art lord here, my Raymond, it will remain ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... were received for the regiment to go into the trenches. Reported at brigade headquarters at sunset, and soon afterward, through the mud and darkness, the men silently felt their way into the trenches, which the rain had reduced to the condition of a quagmire. It was a slow process, and 10 o'clock came before all were in ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... between the two, I should prefer to err with the slow and cautious rather than with the rash and over-bold; the former may for a while serve as a drag upon the chariot wheels of progress, the latter are sure to thrust us out of the road and land us at last in some quagmire whence it will be very hard to get back into ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... iron shoes be my Pegasus shod! For my road is a rough one: flint, stubble, and clod, Blue clay, and black quagmire, brambles no few, And ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... outlet in any direction. Unlike the mellow, sandy loam in front of the house, the swale in the rear was of the stiffest kind of clay—just the soil to retain and be spoiled by water. During the first year of our residence here this region was sometimes a pond, sometimes a quagmire, while again, under the summer sun, it baked into earthenware. It was a doubtful question whether this stubborn acre could be subdued, and yet its heavy clay gave me just the diversity of soil I needed. Throughout the high gravelly knoll ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... going right?" the magistrate said to Walter. "The marsh seems to stretch everywhere, and we might well fall into a quagmire, which ...
— Saint George for England • G. A. Henty
... paths upon the fells. You have seen them, Monsieur Upperton. They are smooth and straight and clear where they begin; but soon they wind to left and wind to right, and so mid rocks and crags until they lose themselves in some quagmire. At Brussels my path was straight; but now, mon Dieu! who is there can tell ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... was through a thick wood, the bottom of which was a mere quagmire, most part of it up to our knees, and often to our middle, and every now and then we had a large tree to get over, for they often lay directly in our road. Besides this, we were continually treading upon the stumps of trees, which were not ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... contrary, at the end of half a year it had seemed to her that she had known no other life. Her young mind having been unskilfully permitted to glance at better things, and then thrown back again into the hopeless quagmire of barbarism, full of strong and uncontrolled passions, had lost the power to discriminate. It seemed to Nina that there was no change and no difference. Whether they traded in brick godowns or on the muddy river bank; whether they ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad
... the Somme, which will be remembered by our soldiers long after they have forgotten the shelling, was worse at Thiepval than elsewhere, or, at least, could not have been worse elsewhere. The road through Thiepval was a bog, the village was a quagmire. Near the chateau there were bits where one sank to the knee. In the great battle for Thiepval, on the 26th of last September, one of our Tanks charged an enemy trench here. It plunged and stuck fast and remained ...
— The Old Front Line • John Masefield
... places, that they are infinitely more attractive and amusing than the best hotels in Paris. Here is one near Valmontone (that is Valmontone the round, walled town on the mount opposite), which is approached by a quagmire almost knee-deep. There is a wild colonnade below, and a dark yard full of empty stables and lofts, and a great long kitchen with a great long bench and a great long form, where a party of travellers, with two priests among them, are crowding round the fire while their supper is cooking. ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... premature, did not at first take them up and standardize them but left them entirely in the hands of local, county, and state Granges. These thereupon proceeded to "gang their ain gait" through the unfamiliar paths of business operations and too frequently brought up in a quagmire. "This purchasing business," said Kelley in 1867, "commenced with buying jackasses; the prospects are that many will be SOLD." But the Grangers went on with their plans for business cooperation with ardor undampened by such ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... good are a pack of City lubbers!" returned Stephen. "Don't we know a quagmire when we see ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... were only three or four families of poor emigrants. Nothing could be done toward relieving those at Donner Lake until help could arrive from Sutter's Fort. A rainy winter had flooded Bear River, and rendered the Sacramento plains a vast quagmire. Yet one man volunteered to go to Sacramento with the tale of horror, and get men and provisions. This man was John Rhodes. Lashing two pine logs together with rawhides, and forming a raft, John ...
— History of the Donner Party • C.F. McGlashan
... standing in this uninviting quagmire for four solid hours. The interpreters were pestered unmercifully to secure us something to eat and to drink, but they were as helpless as ourselves. They were well-nigh distracted at the ugly turn which things were taking. Matters were certainly becoming ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney
... upon the road, and took with him twenty knights. And as he went he did great good, and gave alms, feeding the poor and needy. And upon the way they found a leper, struggling in a quagmire, who cried out to them with a loud voice to help him for the love of God; and when Rodrigo heard this, he alighted from his beast and helped him, and placed him upon the beast before him, and carried him with him in this manner to the inn where he took up his ...
— Chronicle Of The Cid • Various
... true, but as for rest, I might as well, or better, have been awake. I fell from one dream into another; found myself wandering through impossible places; started in an agony of fear, and then dozed again, only to plunge into some deeper quagmire of trouble; and through all there was a vague feeling I was pursuing a person who eluded all my efforts to find him; playing a terrible game of hide-and-seek with a man who always slipped away from my touch, panting up mountains and running down declivities after one who had better ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... a longer way back by the shore, a good deal longer; now over rough, rocky stretches where he stumbled in the darkness, now through marshy, sodden ground where he sank as in a quagmire time and again over his ankles. It was even longer than he had counted on, and time, with the Weasel on one hand and the return of the police on the other, was a factor to be reckoned with again, ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... the pitfalls of crime; for the simple-minded burglar or embezzler may blithely make way with a silver service or bundle of bank notes only to find himself floundering, horse, foot and dragoons, in a quagmire of phraseology from which he cannot escape, wriggle as he will. Many such a one has thrown up his hands—and with them silver service, bank notes and all—in horror at what the grand jury has alleged ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... and through quagmire he plashed, His pace never daring to slack; Till the hostel he neared, for greatly he feared Old Grindrod would ...
— Bygone Punishments • William Andrews
... great men, whose supremacy she acknowledged with the futile uprearing of any angry woman, were against her. She eyed the lawyer, Eliphalet Means, with particular distrust. She had always held all legal proceedings as a species of quagmire to entrap the innocent and unwary. She watched while the lawyer took some documents from his bag and laid them on the table. "I won't sign a thing, nohow," she avowed to herself, ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Village, eight or ten miles off, and itself two miles long,—where he understands the Saxons are. Miller lad guides us, over height and hollow, with his best skill, at a brisk pace;—through one hollow, where he has known the cattle pasture in summer time; but which proves impassable, and mere quagmire, at this season. No getting through it, you unfortunate miller lad (GARCON DE MEUNIER). Nevertheless, we did find passage through the skirts of it: nay this quagmire proved the luck of us; for the enemy, trusting to it, had ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... which the boys called the quagmire, was a low place in the pathway, where it was almost always muddy. This pathway was made by the cows, going up and down to drink; and it was a good, dry, and hard path in all places but one. This, in the spring of the year, was very wet and miry; and, during ...
— Rollo at Work • Jacob Abbott
... literature, and to stand, as he did, under the same roof with the nymphs who had long bodied forth his pictorial ideal, was to invite a public avowal of his proposed championship of free art. He was lured the farther into this quagmire by the guileless questioning of one of his listeners, who lingered in obvious fascination after his fellows had departed, and, in happy ignorance that the cherubic youth was the son of an artist of distinction, and himself no mean critic of things artistic, Shelby ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... waiting for the Eastern mail. The night watchman's orders were to stop for it if the trains were anywhere near on time. At this storm season the Westbound was frequently behind and the road to town a quagmire. We never looked for Fahey—he was the man I found there as night watchman—before eight o'clock. It had rained and snowed off and on since the month began. In the dark, low rooms the fire burned all day. The dining-room, which had blue-green walls in imitation ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... with innumerable difficulties. There was no firm foundation on which to work, and no trees to assist in forming hurdles. All we could do was to bind together large quantities of swamp weeds and lay them across the quagmire. It was but the semblance of a road, ...
— The Battle of New Orleans • Zachary F. Smith
... more conspicuous for the poverty of the period in which a large and calamitous part of his career was spent. As the student plods along one of the dreariest wastes of the national annals, his name gleams across the tedious page. When from time to time he flits over the stage, the quagmire of Court intrigues and jobbing favouritism is illuminated with ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... Hamley no sympathy in him? She would show that she had, at any rate. So she quite declined the part, which he had hoped she would have taken, of respondent, and possible questioner; and his work became more and more like that of a man walking in a quagmire. Once the squire roused himself to speak to the butler; he felt the need of outward stimulus—of a better vintage ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... more than one Indian fell, never more to rise. He kept his eyes upon the bushes and trees trying to catch glimpses of the dusky figures as they skulked among them, and paid little heed to the path he was taking. So suddenly he found himself floundering in a quagmire. ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... gravel surface, now a neglected stretch full of dangerous holes; and worst of all, running through the great forests, long pieces of road from which the stumps had been only partly extracted, and where the sunlight barely penetrated. Here the soaked earth became little less than a quagmire. ...
— Painted Windows • Elia W. Peattie
... of being in a quagmire, implies your inability to meet obligations. To see others thus situated, denotes that the failures of others will be felt by you. Illness is ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... observable current) called Bayouc St. Jean; it comes close to New Orleans, and falls into this lake at Grass Point (Pointe aux Herbes) which projects a great way into the lake, at two leagues distance from Cockle-island. We passed near that Point, which is nothing but a quagmire. From thence we proceeded to the Bayouc Choupic, so denominated from a fish of that name, and three leagues from the Pointe aux Herbes. The many rivulets, which discharge themselves into this lake, make its ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... intended as a caution, yet she had never thought it possible that a girl so steady in her ordinary demeanour, so utterly averse to all flirtation, so little given to the weakness of feminine susceptibility, would fall at once into such a quagmire of indiscreet love-troubles. The caution had been intended, rather in regard to outward appearances, and perhaps with the view of preventing the possibility of some slight heart-scratches, than with the idea that danger of this nature was ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... turnpike, not inferior, I was told, in ordinary times to the average of such roads; in many places the mud literally touched the axles, and more than once we should have been set fast in spite of the struggles of our team, if I had not lightened the weight by descending into a quagmire that reached fully ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... sons should only weep in silence without the impotent complaints and mutual recriminations of slaves.' That as patriotic a heart as ever beat should have been afflicted to this point by the canker of despair tells of the quagmire—not only political but spiritual—into which Italy was sunk. The first thing needful was to restore the people to consciousness, to animation of some sort, it did not matter what, so it were a sign of ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... ground is a quagmire, and any advance by either side is out of the question. But a time will come when the ground is just solid enough for a man to stand, there will be a desperate struggle for a few yards of ground, again both sides will subside ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... found. The only solid foundation is, as in the case of the earth's crust, pretty near the surface of things; the deeper we try to go, the damper and darker and altogether more uncongenial we find it. There is no knowing into what quagmire of superstition we may not find ourselves drawn, if we once cut ourselves adrift from those superficial aspects of things, in which alone our nature permits us ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... tight shut like a vise, with a muddy complexion and thin arms, treat themselves to the malicious pleasure of promenading their Adolphe through the quagmire of falsehood and contradiction: they question him (see Troubles within Troubles), like a magistrate examining a criminal, reserving the spiteful enjoyment of crushing his denials by positive proof at a decisive moment. Generally, in ...
— Petty Troubles of Married Life, Second Part • Honore de Balzac
... than that. Sibley is as treacherous as a quagmire. If a woman ventured into a false position with him he would marry her only when compelled to do so. I'm savage enough to shoot them both this afternoon. I see but one way out. I must warn her promptly, and in language so emphatic that she will understand it, that everything must be after the ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... and long-continued have been the hurricanes of steel which have swept these slopes, that the surface of the earth has been literally blasted away, leaving a treacherous and incredibly tenacious quagmire in which horses and even soldiers have lost their lives. General Dubois told me that, only a few days before my visit to Verdun, one of his staff-officers, returning alone and afoot from an errand to Vaux, had ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... despair, and much frightened as well—wet and weary too, poor things. This most welcome re-enforcement inspired all with fresh courage, and, guided by Pierre's suggestions, they soon succeeded in getting the unwieldy vehicle out of the quagmire and into the road leading to the chateau, which was speedily reached, and the huge equipage safely piloted through the grand portico into the interior court. The oxen were at once taken from before it and led into the stable, ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... daughter, Arabella, looked sad and pensive. How weary, flat and stale appeared her existence now! With a lump in her throat and a pang in her heart, she recklessly wiped her eyes upon the best parlor curtains, when Barnes mounted to the box, as robust a stage-driver as ever extricated a coach from a quagmire. The team, playful through long confinement, tugged at the reins, and Sandy, who was at the bits, occasionally shot through space like ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... and of hostile ghosts, of deadly spirits and of fierce enemies, gleams luridly through every line. The fen and the forest are dim and dark; will-o'-the-wisps flit above them, and gloom closes them in; wolves and wild boars lurk there, the quagmire opens its jaws and swallows the horse and his rider; the foeman comes through it to bring fire and slaughter to the clan-village at the dead of night. To these real terrors and dangers of the mark are added the fancied ones of superstition. There the terrible forms begotten of man's vague ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... and a fresh stake, tramped around to the eastern side of the slough. Having got the range of the stakes, he was moving slowly back toward them, holding his stake before him, when the youth signalled him to stop just in the edge of the quagmire. ...
— The Young Surveyor; - or Jack on the Prairies • J. T. Trowbridge
... rolled over the building. There was a dead silence. Was it going to rain? Was it going to pour? Was the storm confined to the metropolis? Would it reach Epsom? A deluge, and the course would be a quagmire, and strength ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... were it, if that prayer were to be denied! And what would the memory of friends be, so sweet and solemn now,—what would it be, but as the taper which the angel of death extinguishes in this earthly quagmire? ...
— Autobiography and Letters of Orville Dewey, D.D. - Edited by his Daughter • Orville Dewey
... Weeks Observation of the Vices and Virtues of the Inhabitants, written by Owen Felltham, and printed Lond. 1659, 12mo. we find them epitomized as a general sea-land—the great bog of Europe—an universal quagmire—in short a green cheese in pickle. The sailors (in which denomination the author appears to include all the natives,) he describes as being able to "drink, rail, swear, niggle, steal, and be lowsie ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... and contempt. Bunyan justly says, "The text calls for sharpness, so do the times." "With those whose religion lieth in some circumstantials, the kingdom swarms at this day." When they stand at the gate, they will "shake like a quagmire—their feigned faith, pretended love, shows of gravity, and holiday words, will stand them in little stead; some professors do with religion just as people do with their best apparel—hang it on the wall all the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... because it was certainly necessary for him to oppose pride with pride, and before the eyes of Evelyn demonstrate his indifference to that lady's choice of Mr. Lee for the minuet and Mr. Lightfoot for the country dance. This last thought had far to travel from some unused, deep-down quagmire of the heart, but it came. For the rest, the image of Audrey decked in silk and lace, turned by her apparel into a dark Court lady, a damsel in waiting to Queen Titania, caught his fancy in both hands. He wished to see her thus,—wished it so strongly that ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... from the clean steams and beautiful green sward of our English woods! Here, you were confined to a quagmire by impervious underwood of prickly pear, penguin, and speargrass; and when we rode under the drooping branches of the trees, that the leaves might brush away the halo of musquittoes, flying ants, and other winged plagues that buzzed about our temples, we ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... Sesphra, I confess that through love men win to sick disgust and self-despising, and for that reason I will not love any more. Now breathlessly the tall lads run to clutch at stars, above the brink of a drab quagmire, and presently time trips them—Oh, Sesphra, wicked Sesphra of the Dreams, you have laid upon me a magic so strong that, horrified, I hear the truth come babbling from long-guarded lips which no longer obey me, ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... the road connecting village with village and town with town was but an uncertain bridle path through woods and over waste places, where in winter horse, man, and wayfarer struggled with bog and quagmire, where robbers lurked in the thickets, and fevers and agues haunted the marsh, where men went armed and every stranger was a foe: it would seem as if most men stayed where they were born and desired not to court the dangers of the unknown world. In many villages, especially in the remote ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant
... winter Sidney Lanier was teaching in Prattville, Alabama, a town built on a quagmire by Daniel Pratt, of whom one of his negroes said his "Massa seemed dissatisfied with the way God had made the earth and he was always digging down the hills and filling up the hollows." Prattville was a small manufacturing town, and Lanier was ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... man had ventured on a sort of quagmire, and had disappeared half-way in the sticky mud. They stretched out their hands, and he rose, covered with slime, but quite satisfied at not having injured his precious entomologist's box. Acteon went beside him, and made it his duty to preserve the unlucky, ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... not lose his temper; he was of too humble a frame of mind to do that, but he got into a hopeless quagmire of mixed recollections, and he too left the witness-box quite unprepared to swear as to the day of the interview with the lady with ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... sketch for him what we should call happiness. The accidental confronting of two individuals pleases the eye, we unite them in our imagination, carrying on the picture before us, and suddenly we find ourselves in a quagmire of absurd incongruities. Now what could be more laughable than to suppose the untamed, and probably untameable young man at my side, with his three wives, his notions about the stars and his Mussulman faith, bound for life to a girl like Miss Westonhaugh? A wise ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford
... human mind listens what it can;—and after seventy years, mournfully asks itself and Mirabeau, "M. le Comte, would there have been in Prussia, for example, any Trade at all, any Nation at all, had it always been left 'Free'? There would have been mere sand and quagmire, and a community of wolves and bisons, M. le Comte. Have the goodness to terminate that Litany, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... considerable permanent change was produced by them. I refer to the action of beavers and of fallen trees in producing bogs, [Footnote: The English nomenclature of this geographical feature does not seem well settled. We have bog, swamp, marsh, morass, moor, fen, turf-moss, peat-moss, quagmire, all of which, though sometimes more or less accurately discriminated, are often used interchangeably, or are perhaps employed, each exclusively, in a particular district. In Sweden, where, especially in the Lappish provinces, this terr-aqueous ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... us quite so well. His Valley of the Shadow of Death is not that Valley of the Shadow of Death which Bunyan imagined. At all events, it is not that dark and horrible glen which has from childhood been in our mind's eye. The valley is a cavern: the quagmire is a lake: the straight path runs zigzag: and Christian appears like a speck in the darkness of the immense vault. We miss, too, those hideous forms which make so striking a part of the description of Bunyan, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... rapid glance at the darkening flat, he then seized his gun, and springing to the spongy bank, half crouching half crawling through reeds and tussocks, he made his way to the brush. A foot and eye less experienced would have plunged its owner helpless in the black quagmire. At one edge of the thicket he heard hoofs trampling the dried twigs. Calvert's horse was already there, tied to ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... the rubber vine grows and thrives; where you go knee-deep in slush and catch at a tree-bole to prevent yourself going farther, cling, sweating at every pore and shivering like a dog, feeling for firmer ground and finding it, only to be led on to another quagmire. The bush pig avoids this place, the leopard shuns it; it is bad in the dry season when the sun gives some light by day, and the moon a gauzy green glimmer by night, but in the rains it is terrific. Night, then, is black as the inside ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... of our great poets, was externally well acquainted with the elements. The sun and he were particularly intimate; wind and rain were his brothers, and frost also distantly related to him. With mud he was hand and glove, and not a bog in the parish, or a quagmire in the neighborhood, but sprung up under Phelim's tread, and threw him forward with the brisk vibration of an old acquaintance. Touching his dress, however, in the early part of his life, if he was clothed with nothing else, he was clothed with mystery. Some assert that ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... was obliged to put one foot cautiously forth to see if the earth ahead were firm enough to bear the weight of her body. On she went, with Phyllis close behind her. In spite of the difficulty the girls were plainly making headway. "Hurrah!" called Madge, "we are almost out of this quagmire. There is dry land ahead!" With one long leap she made the solid ground which stretched just ahead of her. Phyllis was not so fortunate. She lunged blindly after Madge, struck an unusually bad part of the marsh and sank knee deep in the soft mud. With a terrified ...
— Madge Morton, Captain of the Merry Maid • Amy D. V. Chalmers
... against; built wooden Forts which are now stone Towns. They fought much and prevalently; galloped desperately to and fro, ever on the alert. In peaceabler ulterior times, they fenced in the Nogat and the Weichsel with dams, whereby unlimited quagmire might become grassy meadow,—as it continues to this day. Marienburg (MARY'S Burg), still a town of importance in that same grassy region, with its grand stone Schloss still visible and even habitable; this was at length their Headquarter. But how many Burgs ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle
... "Spiritual Wives," or any such light and airy subject, without possessing much knowledge, or indulging in much thought, but he can't play such tricks upon Agriculture. She is very much like a donkey: unless you are thoroughly acquainted with her playful ways, she will upset you in a quagmire. Perhaps it is due to my readers that I should say here that I have read a great many valuable treatises upon this subject, among which may be named, "Cometh up as a Flour," "Anatomy of Melon-cholly," "Sowing and Reaping," one thousand or two volumes of Patent Office Reports, and three ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 18, July 30, 1870 • Various
... Byles is very witty," Miss Newville remarked. "He asked the selectmen several times to give their attention to a quagmire in the road near his house. After long delay, they stepped into a chaise and rode to the spot. Suddenly they found themselves stuck in the mud. Mr. Byles opened his window and remarked that he was glad they were stirring in ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... beaten motionless and sodden by the onslaught of consecutive storms; the southeast trades brought the saline breath of the outlying Pacific even to the busy haunts of Commercial and Kearney streets; the low-lying Mission road was a quagmire; along the City Front, despite of piles and pier and wharf, the Pacific tides still asserted themselves in mud and ooze as far as Sansome Street; the wooden sidewalks of Clay and Montgomery streets were mere floating bridges or buoyant pontoons superposed on elastic bogs; Battery Street ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... snow about the door into a pool of mud. Riding-saddles and bridles, pack-saddles and strings of bells, mules and men, lanterns, torches, sacks, provender, barrels, cheeses, kegs of honey and butter, straw bundles and packages of many shapes, were crowded confusedly together in this thawed quagmire and about the steps. Up here in the clouds, everything was seen through cloud, and seemed dissolving into cloud. The breath of the men was cloud, the breath of the mules was cloud, the lights were encircled by cloud, speakers close at hand were not seen for ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... spot where the crumbling adobe walls of the casa had returned to the parent soil that gave it. The channel was deepened, the lagoon was drained, until one evening the magic mirror that had so long reflected the weary waiting of the Blue Grass Penelope lay dull, dead, lusterless, an opaque quagmire of noisome corruption and decay to be put away from the sight of man forever. On this spot the crows, the titular tenants of Los Cuervos, assembled in tumultuous congress, coming and going in mysterious clouds, or laboring ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... experience was worth what it cost. The spectacle of a man prevented by religious scruples from photographing children at prayers, while plotting at the same time to rob his employer, has been a kind of chart to me that has piloted me through more than one quagmire of queer human nature. Nothing could stump me after that. The man was just as sincere in the matter of his scruple as he was rascally in his ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... charge led by himself bearing the standard; and, in a third disastrous rush, Bonaparte, who had caught up the standard and planted it on the bridge with his own hand, was himself swept back into a quagmire, where he would have perished but for a fourth return of the grenadiers, who drove back the pursuing Austrians, and pulled their commander from the swamp. Fired by his undaunted courage, the gallant lines were formed once more. At that moment another French corps ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... and the plain between it and Sutter's Fort seemed a vast quagmire, but John Rhodes volunteered to deliver the letter. He was ferried over the river on a raft formed of two logs lashed together with strips of rawhide. Then he rolled his trousers above the knee and with his shoes in his hand, started on his mission. ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton
... when our chilled feet could bear no more, we sought out a patch of raised ground a little firmer than a quagmire, and heaped up the beginnings of a fire with such brush as could be made to burn, robbing the naked thickets. Saddle and steak sizzled, leather steamed and stiffened, hearts and bodies thawed; grievances that men had nursed over miles of water melted. Courage ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill |
