"Wrack" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... as the morning spread upon the mountains; a great people and strong; there had not been ever the like, neither should be any more after it: the land was a garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness: Yea, and nothing should escape them.' All things were going to wrack; the country was overrun by foreign invaders; bankruptcy, devastation, massacre, and captivity were for perhaps 100 years the normal state of Gaul, and of most other countries besides. I have little doubt that Salvian was a prudent man, when he thought fit to bring no ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... suggests itself at once. But what were the circumstances of the collision? Did an extinguished sun, flying blindly through space, plunge into a vast cloud of meteoric particles, and, under the lashing impact of so many myriads of missiles, break into superficial incandescence, while the cosmical wrack through which it had driven remained glowing with nebulous luminosity? Such an explanation has been offered by Seeliger. Or was Vogel right when he suggested that Nova Aurigae could be accounted for by supposing ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... field and mead, The rounding noon hangs hard and white; Into the gathering heats recede The hollows of the Chelsea height; But under all to one quiet tune, A spirit in cool depths withdrawn, With logs, and dust, and wrack bestrewn, The stately river ...
— Lyrics of Earth • Archibald Lampman
... fit guide to lead my way, And as I deemed I did pursue her track; Wit lost his aim, and will was fancy's prey; The rebel won, the ruler went to wrack. But now sith fancy did with folly end, Wit, bought with loss — will, taught by ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... he raised his eyes again. A broad band of pale clear light was shining into the room, and when he looked out of the window he saw the road all brightened by glittering pools of water, and as the last drops of the rain-storm starred these mirrors the sun sank into the wrack. Lucian gazed about him, perplexed, till his eyes fell on the clock above his empty hearth. He had been sitting, motionless, for nearly two hours without any sense of the passage of time, and without ceasing he had murmured those words as he dreamed an endless ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... my breath, To flye from them that holds my God in hate, My Mistres, Countrey, me, and my sworne fayth, Were to pull of the load from Typhons back, And crush my selfe, with shame and seruille wrack. ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, v. 7 - England's Naval Exploits Against Spain • Richard Hakluyt
... fear was on the seaport towns, The weight of his hand held hard the downs. And the merchants cursed him, bitter and black, For a red flame in the sea-fog's wrack Was all of their ships ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... higher rose the norther; the latter being a cold dry wind is, consequently, a heavy wind. And when the sky was comparatively clear and blue, the display of cirri was noticeable. In some places they formed filmy crosses and thready lozenges; in others the wrack fell into the shape of the letter Z; and from the western horizon the curl-clouds shot up thin rays, with a common centre hid behind the mountains of Sinai, affecting all ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... the next morning to put into Falmouth Haven, in Cornwall, where such and so terrible a tempest took us, as few men have seen the like, and was indeed so vehement that all our ships were like to have gone to wrack. But it pleased God to preserve us from that extremity and to afflict us only for that present with these two particulars: the mast of our Admiral, which was the Pelican, was cut overboard for the safeguard of the ship, and the Marigold was driven ashore, and somewhat bruised. ...
— Sir Francis Drake's Famous Voyage Round the World • Francis Pretty
... earthly lives are spent. We have two dwelling-places. By the body we are brought into connection with this frail, evanescent, illusory outer world, and we try to make our homes out of shifting cloud-wrack, and dream that we can compel mutability to become immutable, that we may dwell secure. But fate is too strong for us, and although we say that we will make our nest in the rocks, and shall never be moved, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... this silent city, my awe grew, for the Colonel, in his gentle voice, spoke of death and wounds, of shell-shock, nerve-wrack and insanity; but he told also of wonderful cures, of miracles performed on those that should have died, and of reason and ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... be so: by heaven there's life in this! The wrack of clouds is driving on the winds, And shews a break of sunshine— Go Grillon, give my orders to Byron, And see your soldiers well disposed within, For safeguard of ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... could get on by myself; but still, Edward, you know we cannot tell what a day may bring forth, and I might fall sick, or something happen which might prevent my attending to anything; and then, without you or Pablo, everything might have gone to wrack and ruin. Certainly, when we think how we were left, by the death of old Jacob, to our own resources, we have much to thank God for in having got ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat
... his fortune felt a wrack, Had that false servant sped in safety back? This night his treasured heaps he meant to steal, And what a fund of charity ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... the murky river flowing sluggishly beneath us. Beyond lay another dull wilderness of bricks and mortar, its silence broken only by the heavy, regular footfall of the policeman, or the songs and shouts of some belated party of revellers. A dull wrack was drifting slowly across the sky, and a star or two twinkled dimly here and there through the rifts of the clouds. Holmes drove in silence, with his head sunk upon his breast, and the air of a man who is lost in thought, while I sat beside him, curious to learn what ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... "to procure relics of the blessed Apostles and martyrs of Christ.... Besides which, he industriously gathered the histories of their martyrdom, together with other ecclesiastical writings, and erected there a large and noble library." Of this library, unfortunately, there is not a wrack left behind. A tiny school was carried on at a monastery near Exeter, where Boniface was first instructed. At the monastery of Nursling he was taught grammar, history, poetry, rhetoric, and the Scriptures; there also manuscripts were copied. Books were ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... was abating. The sun began to shine out through the driving wrack of clouds. The woodland tracks might be wet, but little reeked the ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green
... may rail at town land till all have gone to wrack, The very straws may wrangle till they've thrown down the stack; The very door-posts bicker till they've pulled in the door, The very ale-jars jostle till the ale is on the floor, But this shall ...
— The Green Helmet and Other Poems • William Butler Yeats
... pipings of leaf and water, London, the while, kept herself in her smudgy convent, her ear tuned only to the jolting music of her streets, the rough syncope of wheel and voice. Since then what countless winds have blown across the world, and cloud-wrack! And this older century is now but a clamor of the memory. What mystery it is! What were the happenings in that pin-prick of universe called London? Of all the millions of ant hills this side Orion, what about this one? London was so certain ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... that no "wrack"—which appears to be a term of art in the timber trade—should be used in the houses to be erected under the Government's new housing scheme. If these were not to be "the unsubstantial fabric of a vision," he implied, the official builders had ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156., March 5, 1919 • Various
... wood was getting low, but he decided that did not matter either. Even so, Ross got to his feet, moving over to the drifts of storm wrack to gather more. Why should he stay here by a useless beacon? But somehow he could not force himself to move on, as ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... admire the grace of Parisian toilets, the eddy of trailing robes with its fairy-foam of lace, the ivorine loveliness of glossy shoulders and jewelled throats, the glimmering of satin-slippered feet,—than to watch the raging of the flood without, or the flying of the wrack ... ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... here. He's got a duty and a responsibility. Your dear father didn't leave him the estate for him to let it go to wrack and ruin. It's most cruel ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair
... regions black with the fumes of sulphur. He trudged across burning lava on which his feet left their imprint; he had the appearance of a desperately dogged traveller. He penetrated into gloomy caverns into which the water of the ocean oozed drop by drop, and flowed like tears along the sea wrack, forming pools on the uneven ground where countless crustaceans increased and multiplied into hideous shapes. Enormous crabs, crayfish, giant lobsters and sea spiders crackled under the dwarfs feet, then crawled away leaving ...
— Honey-Bee - 1911 • Anatole France
... Nay, an this were all, 'twere something; but they are the only known enemies to my generation. A fasting-day no sooner comes, but my lineage goes to wrack; poor cobs! they smoak for it, they are made martyrs O' the gridiron, they melt in passion: and your maids to know this, and yet would have me turn Hannibal, and eat my own flesh and blood. My princely coz, [pulls out a red herring] ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... jaws and eyes a-stare; Or on a lotus leaf would crawl A brindled loach to bask and sprawl, Tasting the warm sun ere it dipped Into the water; but quick as fear Back his shining brown head slipped To crouch on the gravel of his lair, Where the cooled sunbeams, broke in wrack, Spilt shattered gold about his back. So within that green-veiled air, Within that white-walled quiet, where Innocent water thought aloud,— Childish prattle that must make The wise sunlight with laughter shake On the leafage overbowed,— Often the King and his love-lass ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... baseless fabric of this vision, The cloudcapt Towers, the gorgeous Palaces, The solemn Temples, the great Globe itself, And all which it inherit, shall dissolve; And like this unsubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a wrack behind'; ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... voice of despair: So the lion-like woman idly wearied the air For awhile, and pierced men's hearing in vain, and wounded their hearts. But as when the weather changes at sea, in dangerous parts, And sudden the hurricane wrack unrolls up the front of the sky, At once the ship lies idle, the sails hang silent on high, The breath of the wind that blew is blown out like the flame of a lamp, And the silent armies of death ...
— Ballads • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mornings, when the grayling are lying on the shallows below the ripple where the rock breaks the surface; by the frozen shore where the land-springs lie fast, drawn into icicles or smeared in slippery slabs on the cliff faces, and hoar frost powders the black sea-wrack; on the lawns of gardens, where the winter roses linger and open dew-drenched and rain-washed in the watery sunbeams—there we see, hear, and welcome the birds that stay. Then and there we note their ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... day passed, and it was not till the evening that the weather moderated. Little by little the great seas began to calm, and the drifts of stinging rain ceased. In their wake the stars struggled through the cloud wrack, and towards ...
— Vandrad the Viking - The Feud and the Spell • J. Storer Clouston
... A formless wrack of clouds streams across the awful sky, and the rain sweeps almost parallel with the horizon. Beyond, the heath stretches off into endless blackness, in the extreme of which either fancy or art has conjured up some undefinable shapes ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... with a noise like pistol shots; my boots squeaked as I went. Overhead the October moon was in her last quarter, and might have been a slice of finger-nail for all the light she afforded. Two-thirds of the time the wrack blotted her out altogether; and I, with my stick clipped tight under my arm-pit, eyes puckered up, and head bent like a butting ram's, but a little aslant, had to keep my wits agog to distinguish the glimmer of the road from the black heath to right and ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... ice Shivers. It cracks! Like a wild beast in pain, it cries to the wrack Of the storm-cloud overhead. The sea answers back— Dread Lilith comes! Listen, ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... the one in which Heritage and Dickson had camped the night before, they opened a fold of the shutters and looked out into a world of grey wrack and driving rain. The Tower roof showed mistily beyond the ridge of down, but its environs were not in their prospect. The lower regions of the House had been gloomy enough, but this bleak place with its drab outlook struck a chill to Sir ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... all the observers. At Jamkandi, in the Western Ghauts, where Lieutenant (now Colonel) Herschel was posted, unremitting bad weather threatened to baffle his eager expectations; but during the lapse of the critical five and a half minutes the clouds broke, and across the driving wrack a "long, finger-like projection" jutted out over the margin of the dark lunar globe. In another moment the spectroscope was pointed towards it; three bright lines—red, orange, and blue—flashed out, and the problem was solved.[514] The problem was solved in this ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... despatch flashed the horrible truth upon him that he might, after all, leave France smaller and weaker than he found her. Then the lightnings of his wrath flash forth, and we see the tumult and anguish of that mighty soul: but previously the storm-wrack of passion and the cloud-bank of his clinging will are lit up by few gleams of the earlier piercing intelligence. On January the 4th he had written to Caulaincourt that the policy of England and the personal rancour of the Czar would drag Austria along. ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... grand, however, to see the pillars and porticos, and the huge bulk of the edifice, heaving up its dome from an obscure foundation into yet more shadowy obscurity; and by the time I reached the corner of the churchyard nearest Cheapside, the whole vast cathedral had utterly vanished, leaving "not a wrack behind," unless those thick, dark vapors were the elements of which it had been composed, and into which it had again dissolved. It is good to think, nevertheless,—and I gladly accept the analogy and ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the islands off the Scotch coasts, sea-wrack (Fucus vesiculosus) forms the chief support of horses and cattle in the winter months. F. serratus is similarly employed ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... our fearful trip is done! The ship has weathered every wrack, the prize we sought is won. The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring. But, O heart! heart! heart! Leave you not the little spot Where on the deck my Captain lies, ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... their moods as I have done. I rarely missed a day in winter, no matter how wild—I have tramped half a day many a time. And I can assure you that the sea itself cannot look more wild, more terrifying—with the wrack driving overhead, and the rain falling in torrents, and the wind whistling and roaring, and rushing past you as if called by the sea to some frightful tryst, some horrible orgy of the elements, and striving to tear you up and carry you with it. Still—still—perhaps ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... mate, coolly, "since you've worked yourself up so much over the matter, and as we're a-goin' along on our course agin, as I suggested to the skipper afore we raised the wrack"—here he went to the pantry and brought out a bottle, and held it out ...
— Mr. Trunnell • T. Jenkins Hains
... shall want, will cause his Indians, To rip the golden bowels of America. Navarre that cloakes them underneath his wings, Shall feele the house of Lorayne is his foe: Your highnes need not feare mine armies force, Tis for your safetie and your enemies wrack. ...
— Massacre at Paris • Christopher Marlowe
... nothing, end in smoke; flat out^; fall to the ground, fall through, fall dead, fall stillborn, fall flat; slip through one's fingers; hang fire, miss fire; flash in the pan, collapse; topple down &c (descent) 305; go to wrack and ruin &c (destruction) 162. go amiss, go wrong, go cross, go hard with, go on a wrong tack; go on ill, come off ill, turn out ill, work ill; take a wrong term, take an ugly term; take an ugly turn, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... seems to have been the equivalent of the English word "seaweed'' and probably stood for any or all of the species of plants which form the "wrack'' of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... go fool'n 'long er no wrack. We's doin' blame' well, en we better let blame' well alone, as de good book says. Like as not dey's ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... a million souls toward death Should burn in utmost hell a million years! —Mothers of men go on the destined wrack To give them life, ...
— The Congo and Other Poems • Vachel Lindsay
... gardener now, too: yaaes I be, to save the wages. And he's gone clean mazed about that garden—yaaes, I think. Would yue believe this, Maaester Harry, that he killed every one o' the blessed strawberries last year with a lot o' wrack from the bache, because he said it wued be as good for them as for ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... without delay. Of course, this was another postponement of Mrs. Benton's own meal, but she didn't mind that, so long as she had an opportunity to deal with the small lads. Explaining to them, as she undressed and bathed them: "You'd go to wrack and ruin if 'twasn't for me takin' a hand in your upbringin' now and then. You pull the wool over Gabriella's eyes the worst ever was. My! What you doing now, ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond
... us peace and plenty, and the quiet we've sought so long; He hath thwarted the wily savage, and kept him from wrack and wrong; And unto our feast the Sachem shall be bidden, that he may know We worship his own Great Spirit, who maketh ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... said the Sunday School was going to wrack and ruin, also the Christian Endeavour. The condition of the church for dust was something scandalous, and strangers were making a mockery of the singing. And the carpet had to be paid for. He supposed they would have to let the women have ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... afternoon when I got to the quay to take a boat to the yacht; for, as I calculated, that would leave me a full hour to the time appointed for sailing. Judge, then, of my amazement when I saw her standing out, the smoke-wrack flying abaft, and trudging steadily for the mouth of the harbour. I stood there, I think, fully three minutes before I moved or took action, but during that space of time I had jumped at the conclusion. ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... many a track Of his old life-toil free; The enchanted calm, the fiery wrack, Far off, ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... a storm has tossed the barque Since first it had its maiden trip, Full many a conflagration's spark Has scorched and seared the laboring ship; And yet it ploughs a straightway course, Through wrack of billows; wind-tossed, spent, On sails the troubled Ship of State, Steered forward ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... he saw his countries go to wrack), From bick'ring with his folk, to keep the Britons back, Cast up that mightly mound of eighty miles in length, ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... General was no longer their landlord; but Overberg was not a bad fellow—he had made many repairs, and even promised to build a new barn which the General would never consent to. It was a pity for the man! A good gentleman, but he took no interest in farming; the whole place must have gone to wrack and ruin if the General had not agreed to sell it before it was too late. The Freule was sorry, for she liked farming; she had learned to milk, and talked to the cows just as if they were human beings. ...
— Major Frank • A. L. G. Bosboom-Toussaint
... fill My pleasure; perchance kill her, or not kill, But lead her home.—Methinks I have foregone The slaying of Helen here in Ilion.... Over the long seas I will bear her back, And there, there, cast her out to whatso wrack Of angry death they may devise, who know Their dearest dead for her in Ilion.—Ho! Ye soldiers! Up into the chambers where She croucheth! Grip the long blood-reeking hair, And drag her to mine eyes ... [Controlling himself. And when there come Fair ...
— The Trojan women of Euripides • Euripides
... should desire in thy hard bloud to bathe? And that their burning wrath which nought can quench Should pittiles on vs still lighten downe? We are not hew'n out of the monst'rous masse Of Giantes those, which heauens wrack conspir'd: Ixions race, false prater of his loues: Nor yet of him who fained lightnings found: Nor cruell Tantalus, nor bloudie Atreus, Whose cursed banquet for Thyestes plague Made the beholding Sunne for horrour turne His backe, and backward from his course returne: And hastning ...
— A Discourse of Life and Death, by Mornay; and Antonius by Garnier • Philippe de Mornay
... alike are lost: Not a pillar nor a post In his Croisic keeps alive the feat as it befell; Not a head in white and black On a single fishing smack, 130 In memory of the man but for whom had gone to wrack All that France saved from the fight whence England bore the bell. Go to Paris: rank on rank. Search, the heroes flung pell-mell On the Louvre, deg. face and flank! deg.135 You shall look long enough ere you come ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... under them to do it. The chief of whom is the [Courlividani.] Courlividani. This person beside his entertainment in the Countrey unto which he is sent to Govern under the Dissauva, hath a due revenue, but smaller then that of the Governour. His chief business is to wrack and hale all that may be for his Master, and to see good Government, and if there be any difference or quarrel between one or other, he takes a Fine from both, and carrieth to the Governour, not regarding equity but the profit of himself and him that imploys him. ...
— An Historical Relation Of The Island Ceylon In The East Indies • Robert Knox
... was wailing in the house by the jetty: the rising had cost some lives though nipped in the bud. The evening tide had cast the body of one of the men upon the shore, where it had been found among the sea-wrack; and, though the fate of the others remained a mystery, the messenger who had sped after Og with the counter-order told the story as he knew it. The means by which the two prisoners, in face of odds so great, had destroyed their captors, ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... barked with the hollow note of consumptives on the outlying rocks. On the horizon was a bank of fog, outlined with the crests and slopes and gulches of the mountain beside him. It sent an advance wrack scudding gracefully across the ocean to puff among the redwoods, capriciously clinging to some, ignoring others. Then came the vast white mountain rushing over the roaring ocean, up the cliffs and into the gloomy forests, blotting ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... of relief to the Poor are old, cumbrous, unequal, as stupid as those who administer them. Forth steps the Reformer, and cries out—"Clear this wrack away! Get rid of your antiquated Bumbledom, your parochial and non-parochial distinctions, your complicated map of local authorities; re-distribute the kingdom on some more practical system, redress the injustice of unequal rating, improve the machinery and spirit of relief, ...
— Ginx's Baby • Edward Jenkins
... long time I stood in the shadow of the window curtains staring out upon a moon hidden ever and anon in flying cloud-wrack; but at last I turned and wandered away with some vague idea of finding Anthony, and as I went, the lights and glitter, the sounds of voices and laughter grew ever more distasteful, and turning my back on it all, I found my way into a wide corridor. And here, in a shady ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... The wrack and ruin of three score years; and it's a terror to live that length, I tell you, and to have your sons going to the dogs against you, and you wore out scolding them, and skelping ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... rest. So lovely-fair was Hero, Venus' nun, As Nature wept, thinking she was undone, Because she took more from her than she left, And of such wondrous beauty her bereft: Therefore, in sign her treasure suffer'd wrack, Since Hero's time hath half the world been black. Amorous Leander, beautiful and young, (Whose tragedy divine Musaeus sung,) Dwelt at Abydos; since him dwelt there none For whom succeeding times make greater moan. His dangling tresses, ...
— Hero and Leander and Other Poems • Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman
... "A wrack!" gasped Mrs. Trefethen, "and 'im in hit! Save us! but 'twill be worse than down shaft. Shaft be dry land, anyway, but they awful sea that rageth like a lion seeking whom it may devour. Oh, ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... the captain peered out through the dense wrack and haze. A great dark cliff loomed out upon the left, jagged, ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a huge tumbled wrack of molten cloud like the ruins of some vast temple of the gods of eld. Chasmed buttresses, battlements overthrown; on the horizon a press of giants, shoulder against shoulder, climbing slowly to the rescue; in mid-sky a praying woman; farther afield a huge head, and a ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 1, January, 1891 • Various
... is in commotion; there is wind and rain; and out of it comes seed harvest. The waters of the sea are poured in thunder wrack upon the hills and run in rivers back into the sea. The winds make weather, and weather profits man. When will man's turmoil cease, when will he find calm? I do not know. I only know that toil and struggle are sweet, and that life well lived is victory. And ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... aflame! Mad whistling shell, wild sneering shot, with devilish glee went past, Like fiendish feet and laughter hurrying down the battle-blast; And through the air, and round the hills, there ran a wrack sublime As though Eternity were crashing on the shores of Time. On bayonets and swords the smile of conscious victory shone, As down to death we dashed the Rebels plucking at our Throne. On, on they came with face of flame, and storm of shot and shell— Up! up! like heaven-sealers, ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... stage," wrote Smith. Many circumstances in The Tempest were doubtless suggested by the wreck of the Sea Venture on "the still vext Bermoothes," as described by William Strachey in his True Repertory of the Wrack and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, written at Jamestown, and published at London in 1610. Shakespeare's contemporary, Michael Drayton, the poet of the Polyolbion, addressed a spirited valedictory ode to the three shiploads of "brave, heroic ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... proud Spanish Armado to wrack, And Travell'd all o'er the old World, and came back, In his old Ship, laden with Gold and old Sack, Like an old ...
— Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Vol. 5 of 6 • Various
... of the last tide were plainly visible high up on the rugged rock-face, the last tide having left every ledge covered with washed-up fucus and bladder-wrack, speckled with white ...
— Crown and Sceptre - A West Country Story • George Manville Fenn
... have said of them; I mean the Capital Offenders, in their Confessions. We professing law must speak reverently of kings and potentates. I perceive these honourable lords, and the rest of this great assembly, are come to hear what hath been scattered upon the wrack of report. We carry a just mind, to condemn no ...
— State Trials, Political and Social - Volume 1 (of 2) • Various
... of thy honour's wrack; Yet for thy honour did I entertain him; Coming from thee, I could not put him back, For it had been dishonour to disdain him: Besides, of weariness he did complain him, And talk'd of virtue: O unlook'd-for evil, When virtue is profaned ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... out from the glands on their sides a copious mucus, which makes them as disagreeable to handle as they are unsightly to look at. Mackerel and cod are the hag's principal victims; but often the fisherman draws up a hag-eaten haddock on the end of his line, of which not a wrack remains but the hollow shell or bare outer simulacrum. As many as twenty of these disgusting parasites have sometimes been found within the body of ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... a cheery "Good-night"—Bellew went out to walk among the roses. And, as he walked, he watched the flying wrack of clouds above his head, and listened to the wind that moaned in fitful gusts. Wherefore, having learned in his many travels to read, and interpret such natural signs and omens, he shook his head, and muttered to himself—even as Adam had ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol
... huge and black, She crushed our ribs in her iron grasp! Down went the Cumberland all a wrack, With a sudden shudder of death, And the cannon's breath For her ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... To my best remembrance, he lay crying out all one night for fear, and at times he would so tremble, that he would make the very bed shake under him. {143c} But, Oh! how the thoughts of Death, of Hell-fire, and of eternal Judgment, did then wrack his conscience. Fear might be seen in his face, and in his tossings to and fro: It might also be heard in his words, and be understood by his heavy groans. He would often cry, I am undone, I am undone; my ...
— The Life and Death of Mr. Badman • John Bunyan
... her skirts close to her body and walked rapidly to the brow of the hill. The twinkling lights were all below. The wrack of cloud torn by the wind into a thousand flapping sails skurried across a sky which the hidden moon patched with a hard angry silver. Far away and high in the storm the great cross on Calvary seemed dancing an inebriated jig above ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... distant it was not visible from the look-out, was discovered in latitude 15 degrees 50 minutes, and 148 degrees 10 minutes longitude. The constant recurrence of breakers, trunks of trees in large quantities, fruits and sea wrack, and the smoothness of the sea, all indicated the neighbourhood of extensive land to the south-east. It was New Holland. Bougainville determined to leave these dangerous latitudes, where he was likely to meet with nothing but barren lands, and a sea strewn with rocks and full of shallows. There ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... clans of the wave With spray and surge and splash appeared: Up from each wrack-strewn, lightless cave Dim day-struck ...
— Christmas in Legend and Story - A Book for Boys and Girls • Elva S. Smith
... crowded back Of Queen Gunhild's wrath and wrack, And a hurried flight by sea; Of grim Vikings, and their rapture In the sea-fight, and the capture, And ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... happiness! Wretched beyond an unutterable woe! And none knew! What was she to pray for? To what purpose and end ought she to steel herself? Ought she to hope, or ought she to despair? "O God, help me!" she kept whispering to Jehovah whenever the heavenly vision shone through the wrack of her meditation. "O God, help me!" She had a conscience that, when it was in the mood for severity, could be unspeakably cruel ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... an unlopp'd trunk it was, and huge, Still rough—like those which men in treeless plains To build them boats fish from the flooded rivers, Hyphasis or Hydaspes, when, high up By their dark spring, the wind in winter time Hath made in Himalayan forests wrack, And strewn the channels with torn boughs—so huge The club which Rustum lifted now, and struck One stroke; but again Sohrab sprang aside, Lithe as the glancing snake, and the club came Thundering to earth, and leapt from Rustum's hand. And Rustum follow'd his own blow, and fell ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... dust!—trees going end over end in the air, rocks as big as a house jumping 'bout a thousand feet high and busting into ten million pieces, cattle turned inside out and a-coming head on with their tails hanging out between their teeth!—and in the midst of all that wrack and destruction sot that cussed Morgan on his gate-post, a-wondering why I didn't stay and hold possession! Laws bless me, I just took one glimpse, General, and lit out'n the county in ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... nay; I look'd for Jamie back; But the wind it blew high, and the ship it was a wrack; His ship it was a wrack—Why didna Jamie dee? Or why do I live to ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... opinion, the shortness of a triennial sitting would have the following ill effects:—It would make the member more shamelessly and shockingly corrupt, it would increase his dependence on those who could best support him at his election, it would wrack and tear to pieces the fortunes of those who stood upon their own fortunes and their private interest, it would make the electors infinitely more venal, and it would make the whole body of the people, who are, whether they have votes or ...
— Thoughts on the Present Discontents - and Speeches • Edmund Burke
... deep into the honest pain-wrack of his calf, and in her he could observe no reluctance ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... the sun's warmth so long as we were cruising among the ice-wrack. Some of the passengers, having been forewarned, were provided with heavy overcoats, oilskin hats, waterproofs, woolen socks, and stogies with great nails driven into the soles. They were iron-bound, copper-fastened tourists, thoroughly equipped—Alpine-stock ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard
... mingled with them, and themselves were dead,— All being dead; and the fair, shining cities Dropped out like jewels from a broken crown. Naught but the core of the great globe remained, A skeleton of stone. And over it The wrack of matter drifted like a cloud, And then recoiled upon itself, and fell Back on the empty world, that with the weight Reeled, staggered, righted, and then headlong plunged Into the darkness, as a ship, when struck By a great sea, throws off the waves at first On either side, then settles ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... rain ceased, the wind abated its rage and the thunder pealed faint with distance, while ever and anon the gloom gave place to a vague light, where, beyond the flying cloud-wrack, a ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... ground,—neither beneath him nor about him nor above him,—but a heaping only, monstrous and measureless, of skulls and fragments of skulls and dust of bone,—with a shimmer of shed teeth strown through the drift of it, like the shimmer of scrags of shell in the wrack of ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... anchor themselves in a secure haven out of reach of the waves, getting all their nutriment from the water, which is the atmosphere of the sea in the same way as air is that of the land. Of course, some of these weeds of the ocean drift from their moorings, like that bladder wrack there with ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... spinning into sea drift at every wind-sheared crest, and blowing, soft as wool, in rolling masses far inland. It was easy to see the greatest crests rear and draw back, showing the roots of the ledges among boulders brown with weed and sea wrack, then swing forward with seemingly irresistible might, to be shattered as if their crystal was that of glass and to fly skyward a hundred feet, scintillant white star drift of comminuted sea. The crash of such waves ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... sold for ten thousand francs, fifteen years later. It was as simple, however, as that two and two make four, and had nothing to do with academic rules. The whole of the right side of my canvas represented a rock, an enormous rock, covered with sea-wrack, brown, yellow, and red, across which the sun poured like a stream of oil. The light, without which one could see the stars concealed in the background, fell upon the stone, and gilded it as if with fire. ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... mention the Great Fair of the Hurdwar, in the northern part of Hindostan, where a confluence of many millions of human beings is brought together under the mixed influences of devotion and commercial business, and, dispersing as rapidly as it has been evoked, the crowd "dislimns and leaves not a wrack behind." But fairs and general enterprise and opulence are not coeval: neither do they flourish in an age of iron roads and steam-carriages. In fact, they were the results of the inconvenience ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... gun still angry-hot, And my lids tingled with the tears held back: 20 This scorn methought was crueller than shot: The manly death-grip in the battle-wrack, Yard-arm to yard-arm, were more friendly far Than such ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... continent. Near her—a little to the south-east—is situated the large island of Europe. Thus, the enlightened French traveller passing to these shores should commune within himself: "I now cross to the Mainland"; and retracing his steps: "I now return to the fragment rent by wrack and earthshock from the Mother-country." And this I say not in the way of paradox, but as the expression of a sober truth. I have in my mind merely the relative depth and extent—the non-insularity, in fact—of the impressions made by the several nations ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... trampled flags they tore; The English strove with desperate strength, paused, rallied, staggered, fled— The green hill-side is matted close with dying and with dead. Across the plain, and far away, passed on that hideous wrack, While cavalier and fantassin dash in upon their track. On Fontenoy, on Fontenoy, like eagles in the sun, With bloody plumes, the Irish stand—the ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... it said na, and I look'd for Jamie back; But hard blew the winds, and his ship was a wrack; The ship was a wrack—why didna Jamie dee? Or why am I spared to cry, Wae ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various |
