"Dank" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Then, again, those servi servorum have dependants in the vast, silent, poverty-stricken world outside your comfortable kitchen fire, in the world of darkness, and hunger, and miserable cold, and dank, flagged cellars, and huddled straw, and rags, in which pale children are swarming. It may be your beer (which runs with great volubility) has a pipe or two which communicates with those dark caverns where hopeless anguish pours the groan, and would scarce see light but for a scrap or two of candle ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... with the unfathomable eyes approaches slowly, with no sound save the hushed murmur of wings. The dread white poppies are in his outstretched hand—the great, nodding white poppies which have come from the dank places and have ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... half-heard utterances of spirits in pain, that groped at inconceivable distances from anything lovely or harmonious, seemed to rise dimly up out of the waves of sound that gathered under his hands. Melancholy human love wandered out on distant heaths, or beneath dank and gloomy cypresses, murmuring its unanswered sorrow, or hateful gnomes sported and sang in the stagnant swamps triumphing in unearthly tones over the knight whom they had lured to his death. Such was ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... over the verandah of the Crow's Nest had shed its first crop of blossoms. The border below was strewn with bright petals of storm-scattered flowers; while above the dank pines dripped and drooped beneath the dead weight of universal moisture. The far-off glory of the mountains was blotted out, as though it had never been; and the doll's house, with its subsidiary group of native huts, had the aspect ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... of the young ones as they wrestled with the nightly problem of their own dank, straight particular bit of woman's glory, would doubtless, if questioned, have upheld the Hindu custom of completely ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... with hunger; a ragged beard hung from his chin. His attire was the same as he had worn when last I saw him, but so tattered and dirty and threadbare that it was a marvel to me it did not fall to pieces before my eyes. The great ruff drooped brown and dank upon his shoulders. The gay shirt and doublet hung like grey sackcloth on his limbs. His shoes flapped in fragments about his feet, and the empty scabbard at his belt swung like the shreds of a worn rope ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... are in Enoshima. High before us slopes the single street, a street of broad steps, a street shadowy, full of multi-coloured flags and dank blue drapery dashed with white fantasticalities, which are words, fluttered by the sea wind. It is lined with taverns and miniature shops. At every one I must pause to look; and to dare to look at anything in Japan is to want to buy it. So I buy, ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... Bird's shrill note 15 Around thy dreary paths shall float; Their boding songs shall scritch-owls pour To fright the guilty shepherds sore, Led by the wandering fires astray Thro' the dank horrors of thy way! 20 While they their mud-lost sandals hunt May all the curses, which they grunt In raging moan like goaded hog, Alight upon ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... is the bed, madly dark the dank cell, Where somebody's boy Is writhing in torture, the ...
— Mother Truth's Melodies - Common Sense For Children • Mrs. E. P. Miller
... little spring still bubbling away as merrily in its granite basin, as if all the Hyndses were not dead and gone. And there was a deep well, protected by a round stone wall, with a cupola-like roof supported by four slender pillars. And everything was dank and weedy and splotched with mildew ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... delves in the sod and dines on clay; he makes no after-dinner speeches; he never responds to a toast; but silently revels on in his dark banquet halls under the dank violets or in the rich mould by the river. But the red worm never reaches the goal of his visions and dreams until he is triumphantly impaled on the fishhook of ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... lamp and oped the gate. 'Twas Love! the little wandering sprite, His pinion sparkled through the night, I knew him by his bow and dart; I knew him by my fluttering heart. Fondly I take him in, and raise The dying embers' cheering blaze; Press from his dank and clinging hair The crystals of the freezing air, And in my hand and bosom hold His little fingers ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... foul, unholy spell, Of malisons and curses fell, Which steeped that soil with venom dank, Of which the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... dank, and great dark slugs moved heavily upon its greasy surface. Here and there strange pale growths grew in patches—twisted, spotted growths that seemed ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... ailments I hear that he excels, And he insures Immediate cures Of weird, uncanny spells; The most unruly patient Gets docile as a lamb And is freed from ill by the potent skill Of Hoodoo-Doctor Sam; Feathers of strangled chickens, Moss from the dank lagoon, And plasters wet With spider sweat In the light ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... were wet, my throat was cold, My garments all were dank;[41] Sure I had drunken in my dreams, And still my ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... The leaning reeds in quiet state About the pool, merged in the green Of misty leaves and hanging vines. The fireflies spun their silver lines Across the deeper atmosphere, And through the silence came the clear Persistent tuning of the frogs From dank recesses of the bogs. ...
— The Five Books of Youth • Robert Hillyer
... Partner, and his daughter, Wingrace Shapcott (a tall and straight young woman, as Beautiful as an Angel), were continually bringing me Comforts and Needments, both in Raiment and Food. It churns my Old Heart now to think of that Beautiful Girl, sitting beside me in my dank Prison Room, the tears streaming from her mild eyes, calling me by Endearing names, and ever and anon taking my hand in hers, and sinking on her knees to the sodden floor (with no thought of soiling her kirtle), while with profound Fervour she prayed ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... out of the sleigh and went into the shanty. The place had one room, and, though a stove stood in the midst of it and the snow that kept some of the frost out was piled to the windows, it was dank and chill. Only a little dim light crept in, and it was a moment or two before Grant saw the man who sat idle by the stove with a clotted bandage round his leg. He was gaunt, and clad in jean patched with flour-bags, and his face showed haggard under his bronze. Behind him on a rude birch-branch ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... sets with extraordinary rapidity. The venerable and somewhat crazy mansion was distinguished from afar by a grove of elms and sycamores that seemed to wave a hospitable invitation, while a few weeping willows, with their dank, drooping foliage, resembling falling waters, gave an idea of coolness that rendered it an attractive spot during ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... here is a wild one. The fall, which is split into two, is thundering beside you; foam, foam, foam is flying all about you; the basin or cauldron is boiling frightfully below you; hirsute rocks are frowning terribly above you, and above them forest trees, dank and wet with spray and mist, are distilling drops in showers from ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... passion, it relaxes All timider persuasion, And, with nor pretext nor occasion, Its wooing redoubles; And pounds the ground, and bubbles In sputtering spray, Flinging itself in a fury Of flashing white away; Till the dusty road Flings a perfume dank abroad, And the grass, and the wide-hung trees, The vines, the flowers in their beds, The vivid corn that to the breeze Rustles along the garden-rows, Visibly lift their heads,— And, as the shower wilder grows, Upleap with ...
— Rose and Roof-Tree - Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... my way opened, the trees thinned a little; presently I beheld a railing, then the house—scarce, by this dim light, distinguishable from the trees; so dank and green were its decaying walls. Entering a portal, fastened only by a latch, I stood amidst a space of enclosed ground, from which the wood swept away in a semicircle. There were no flowers, no garden-beds; only a ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... into the hotel, while Winter went to the station to make sure of Siddle's departure and destination. Yes, the chemist had taken a return ticket to Epsom, where a strip of dank meadow-land on the road to Esher marks the last resting-place of many of London's epileptics. On returning to the high-street, Winter lighted a cigar, a somewhat common occurrence in his everyday life, where-upon Furneaux walked swiftly up the hill. A farmer, living near the center of ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... creature's life was the children's hair. She would tug and strain with her comb, accompanying her work with her misplaced pieties. And when finally she was through with her triple job she always fired up and exploded her thanks toward the sky, where they belonged, in this form: "Gott sei Dank ich bin fertig mit'm Gott verdammtes Haar!" (I believe I am not quite brave ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... cold. A close mist that had come from the mountains hovered over the court and crept into every crevice, chilling and dank. ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... the vicolo, dark of wall and dank of pavement, with petticoats and shirts dangling from numerous windows and fluttering like gibbeted wretches in the air; with frowzy women sewing or knitting in the sombre doorways and squalid urchins screaming everywhere; with humble vegetables and cheap wines exposed for sale in dirty windows; ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... he murmured, looking up at her with limpid eyes. "You haf seen how I suffered, unt you haf taken pity. Gott sie dank! Gott sie dank!" ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... first break of day, and, leaving the postillion fast asleep, stepped out of the tent. The dingle was dank and dripping. I lighted a fire of coals, and got my forge in readiness. I then ascended to the field, where the chaise was standing as we had left it on the previous evening. After looking at the cloud-stone near it, now cold, and split into three pieces, I set about prying narrowly into the ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... coming from Hampstead to London, at the chill break of day, when the overhanging clouds were yet charged with the 'inky' purple of night—in order, like a true book-chevalier, to embrace the first dank impression, or proof sheet, of his own famous octavo edition of Shakspeare; and of Mr. Bulmer's sumptuous impression of the text of the same. All this is well enough, and savours of the proper spirit of BIBLIOMANIACISM: and the edition of our immortal bard, in fifteen ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... kind of dressing-robe more closely round her, the mistress of the house now descended the stairs, rapidly, flittingly, with a step noiseless as a spectre's, and, grasping Losely firmly by the hand, led him into a chill, dank, sunless drawing-room, gazing into his face ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... extravagance to a romantic, situation. So various are the characters which water can assume, that there is scarcely an idea in which it may not concur, or an impression which it cannot enforce; a deep stagnated pool, dank and dark with shades which it dimly reflects, befits the seat of melancholy; even a river, if it be sunk between two dismal banks, and dull both in motion and colour, is like a hollow eye which deadens the countenance; and over a sluggard, silent stream, ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... of the wood, gazing at all the pomp and procession of the foxgloves towering amidst the bracken and shining red in the broad sunshine, and beyond them into deep thickets of close undergrowth where springs boil up from the rock and nourish the water-weeds, dank and evil. But in all my wanderings I avoided one part of the wood; it was not till yesterday that I climbed to the summit of the hill, and stood upon the ancient Roman road that threads the highest ridge of the wood. Here they had walked, Helen and Rachel, ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... and dank ere yet he reached That spot; and lo! where lamb had lain, and dove Had mourned, and child had raced, there stood indeed High-raised, the Cross of Christ. Before it long He prayed, and kneeling, marked that on a tomb That Cross was raised. ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... expand into a glassy lake—the sequestered pool, reflecting the quivering trees, with the yellow leaf sleeping on its bosom, and the trout roaming fearlessly about its limpid waters; while some rustic temple, or sylvan statue, grown green and dank with age, gives an air of classic sanctity to ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... itself we soon secured a semblance of order. Maida's girls were here, with wet veils and long dank tresses clinging to their sleek bodies. Lips painted alluring red. But eyes which now were solemn and grim. Their demeanor alert and business-like. Unconscious of themselves they moved about the palace, executing ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... of the cane-brake, green and dank, That girdled his home by the Dacca tank. He thought of his wife and his High School son, He thought—but abandoned the thought—of a gun. His sleep was broken by visions dread Of a shining ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... through the passage, which was as dark and dank as the pit, and the officers followed her in single file. They crawled, and they crawled, and they kept on crawling, for the passage was not big enough to allow them to stand upright. It turned this way and twisted that, sometimes like a corkscrew ...
— Tik-Tok of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... couldn't or wouldn't work with others. So was conceived "Brother Francesco," an opera set in a monastery in Italy during the Seventeenth Century, and bringing up a vivid picture of monks, medieval chapels—dark, massive and severe—and the dank scent of deep tragedy. There were but four main characters, a quartette of voices, in "Brother Francesco," which was in one act of about an hour and ten minutes, the whole story unravelling itself in the public chapel between the ringing of the church bell ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... they were picking their way along the embankment at the side of the great drain, now once more filled with salt water, while when they reached the mouth, where a peculiar dank saline odour was perceptible, the two men who had been flitting before them with lanthorns like a couple of will-o'-the-wisps, went cautiously down the crumbling bank, followed by the engineer, and the mischief done was ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... were married, tradition has it that Rossetti withheld his blessing and sought to drown his sorrow in fomentation's, with dark, dank hints in baritone to the effect that the Thames only ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... the gleam of lake and stream, The silver glint in frost portrayed Of the bright cascade; They bear the moisture of marshes dank, The dew of the lawn, or river bank, The river itself by sunlight drank; All these in frigid air, That strange alembic, crystallize In odd, fantastic shape and size Like ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... Thoughts apt to neighbour thine, thou creature sunlit? If through long fret and irk Thine eyes within their browed recesses were Worn caves where thought lay couchant in its lair; Wert thou a spark among dank leaves, ah ruth! With age in all thy veins, while all thy heart was youth; Our contact might run smooth. But life's Eoan dews still moist thy ringed hair; Dian's chill finger-tips Thaw if at night they happen on thy lips; The flying ...
— Sister Songs • Francis Thompson
... troubled often enough in these days, which immediately followed our almost miraculous escape, from the den of Fu-Manchu; and now as I crouched there, nerves aquiver—listening—listening—I could not be sure if this dank panic which possessed me had its origin in nightmare or ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... platform nor hardly the outline of a human shape, in the dark grey of the midnight. But the town was all asleep. There was no peril of discovery. The minister might stand there, if it so pleased him, until morning should redden in the east, without other risk than that the dank and chill night air would creep into his frame, and stiffen his joints with rheumatism, and clog his throat with catarrh and cough; thereby defrauding the expectant audience of to-morrow's prayer and sermon. No eye could see him, save that ever-wakeful one which had ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Strange humid leaves, which knew nothing of the seasons of the year, and quaint-natured mosses were revealed on the wellside as the lantern descended; till its rays fell upon a confused mass of rope and bucket dangling in the dank, dark air. ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... had fallen steadily, and the mists hung heavy over the valley. The lower hills were wrapped as in a winding sheet; dank and cold. The trees were dripping with moisture. The ...
— The Shepherd of the Hills • Harold Bell Wright
... us that the light was still there, ready to flash out at a moment's notice. To me, with my nerves worked up to a pitch of expectancy, there was something depressing and subduing in the sudden gloom, and in the cold, dank air of the vault. ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... was playing by the town-pump. Tim Brimm and the bugles of Harlem blared in the little streets of Maron in far Lorraine. The tiny streets were seas of mud. Dank mist and rain sifted through the cold air above the blue Moselle. Soldiers—soldiers everywhere—black soldiers, boys of Washington, Alabama, Philadelphia, Mississippi. Wild and sweet and wooing leapt the strains upon the air. French children ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... smoke, but the water of mortal terror filled their mouths. The smell of dead, dank tobacco pervaded ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... best of the meat they brought with them. if I cannot procure a sufficient quantity of Elk's skins I shall substitute those of the buffaloe. late in the evening the party arrived with two more canoes and another portion of the baggage. Whitehouse one of them much heated and fortiegued on his arrivall dank a very hearty draught of water and was taken almost instanly extreemly ill. his pulse were very full and I therefore bled him plentifully from which he felt great relief. I had no other instrument with which to perform this ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... throat was cold, My garments all were dank; Sure I had drunken in my dreams, And still my ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... art shall other changes find, And open still and vary still the mind. The countless clans that tread these dank abodes, Who glean spontaneous fruits and range the woods, Fixt here for ages, in their swarthy face Display the wild complexion of the place. Yet when the hordes to happy nations rise, And earth By culture warms the genial ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... the organ was unusually large, the skin of the penis thick, and it was only by keeping the bladder empty that prevented a state of engorgement that would have effectually interfered with further catheterization. As it was, the penis was often dank, livid, and discolored ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... passes heedlessly over the barren wastes, and climbs with cheerful ardour each rugged mountain. But suppose that brilliant star to be blotted out of the sky; suppose the lustre of the horizon to have faded into the dank and gloomy shades of a cloudy evening; suppose the pursuit to be now without an object, and the blood which hope had sent merrily through the veins, to gather and curdle round the desponding heart. Then it is, that life is abandoned to persecuting fiends, ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... up idly, "but did you say two years, Dick? Nay, surely 'tis a score. Why," he added in a changed voice, "who may that be in the hollow?" and he pointed to a tall figure which stood beneath them at a distance, half-hidden by the dank snow-mists. ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... great pithecanthropus aroused no jarring discord for he was as much a part of it as the trees that grew upon the summit of the cliff or those that hid their feet among the dank ferns in ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... that he is unlikely ever to paint again. [E] A strange artist, Utrillo, personal enough, just as Modigliani was handsome enough, to satisfy the exigences of the most romantic melodrama, with a touch of madness and an odd nostalgic passion—expressing itself in an inimitable white—for the dank and dirty whitewash and cheap cast-iron of the Parisian suburbs. Towards the end, when he was already very ill, he began to concoct a formula for dealing with these melancholy scenes which might have been his undoing. His career was of a few years only, ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... and call the cattle home, And call the cattle home, And call the cattle home Across the sands of Dee!" The western wind was wild and dank with foam, And ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... little better." The moon swung higher and the light increased somewhat, but at best it was poor enough, serving only to bring out the general outlines of the trail and the bolder contour of the coulee's rim. No breath of the wind stirred the air that was cold, with a dank, clammy coldness—like the dead air of a cistern. As she rode, the girl noticed the absence of its buoyant tang. The horses' hoofs rang hollow and thin on the hard rock of the coulee bed, and even the frenzied yapping of a pack of coyotes, sounded uncanny and far away. Between these sounds ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... sat along the curbstones before their baskets. Their dank hair hung trailed over their brows. They were not beautiful to see as they crouched in the mire. But their souls were seen by God; and if their souls were in a state of grace they were radiant to see: and God ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... outstretched against the left-hand wall, he reached the spot where, the horse had been, and shuddered on the smooth dark edge of a hole that went the full width of the floor. There came whispering up out of it, and a dank wet smell, as if there were running water a mile away below. He could feel that a little air flowed downward into it. Twenty yards away on the far side the path resumed, but there was neither hand nor foothold on the smooth damp walls between. He went back to his men with a shiver ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... thee, Adelaide! 'twas sweet, though mournful. But why thy brow o'ercast, thy cheek so wan? Thou look'st as a lorn maid beside some stream, That sighs away the soul in fond despairing, While sorrow sad, like the dank willow near her, Hangs o'er the ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... in proud and ineffable disgust from the first work of Rubens which he encounters on his return across the Alps. But is he right in his indignation? He has forgotten, that while Angelico prayed and wept in his olive shade, there was different work doing in the dank fields of Flanders;—wild seas to be banked out; endless canals to be dug, and boundless marshes to be drained; hard ploughing and harrowing of the frosty clay; careful breeding of stout horses and fat cattle; close setting of brick walls against cold winds and snow; much hardening of hands and ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... afterwards. It would be a grand revenge if he could get her into the cemetery alive and thrust her, the living, down amongst the dead, through those little doors which opened like church doors to the cold, dank ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... dome, That now is void, and dank with rain, And one,—oh, hope more frail than foam! The bird to his deserted home Sings ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... the dark, dank, icy-cold dungeon, St. George lay in his heavy chains, and wondered what was going to happen next. It was very horrible, down there, and he ached in every limb, and he was very hungry; but somehow he felt ...
— Stories of the Saints by Candle-Light • Vera C. Barclay
... beneath the clouds, Veronique came in sight of her Lady, the Queen's favourite, it was to see her leading by a string a little shaggy cow, with a bell round its neck, her gray cloak huddled round her, though dank with wet, a long lock of black hair streaming over her brow, her garments clinging with damp, her bare ankles scratched with thorns, her heavy SABOTS covered with mire, her cheeks ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... mahogany and india-rubber trees, dyewoods, canes, llianas, and many other gigantic parasites. In the underwood you meet thorny aloes, the "pita" plant, and wild mezcal; various Cactacese, and flora of singular forms, scarcely known to the botanist. There are swamps, dark and dank, overshadowed by the tall cypress, with its pendent streamers of silvery moss (Tillandsia usneoides). From these arise the miasma—the ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... thereby. We build our labyrinth Of sacred words and potent spells, and all The deep-involved horrors of our craft— Its entrance hedg'd about with dreadful oaths, And every step in thridding it made dank By dripping terror and out-seeping awe. Shall it be said that e'en Ludovico May break our faith and live? Never, ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... as best he might. Rockbridge and Carpenter and Waters no longer thundered from the heights. The grey infantry, wildly scattered, came in a slow surge back through the woods where dead men lay among the spring flowers, and down the ridge and through the fields, grey and dank in the March twilight, toward the Valley pike. Night and the lost battle weighed upon the army. The shadowy ambulances, the lights of the gatherers of the wounded flitting few and far over the smoke-clouded field, made for a ghastly depression. Sick at heart, ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... should have gone wrong. Such thoughts come easily enough when you are lying full length in black darkness, in a hole just large enough to hold a man; in air so stifling that the laboured breath can scarcely come; with the dank earth just under mouth and nose, and overhead a roof that may fall in at any moment. The dragging minutes went by. Then, just as despair seized him, the boots ahead moved. He wriggled after them, finding himself praying desperately as he went. A rush of sweet air ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... she dated from the Short war, had served as a privateer, been taken by the British, passed through many vicissitudes, and was in no condition for a long cruise in the Pacific. So mouldering was her fabric, that the reckless sailors, when seated in the forecastle, dug their knives into the dank boards between them and eternity as easily as into the moist sides of some old pollard oak. She was much dilapidated and rapidly becoming more so; for Black Baltimore, the ship's cook, when in want of firewood, did not scruple to hack splinters from the bits ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... that they shouldered one another out of their places, and the weakest, forced into shapes of strange distortion, languished like cripples. The best were stunted, from the pressure and the want of room; and high about the stems of all grew long rank grass, dank weeds, and frowsy underwood; not divisible into their separate kinds, but tangled all together in a heap; a jungle deep and dark, with neither earth nor water at its roots, but putrid matter, formed of the pulpy offal of the two, ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... course of his peregrinations, that there existed in two places under the Chicago River—in the first place at La Salle Street, running north and south, and in the second at Washington Street, running east and west—two now soggy and rat-infested tunnels which were never used by anybody—dark, dank, dripping affairs only vaguely lighted with oil-lamp, and oozing with water. Upon investigation he learned that they had been built years before to accommodate this same tide of wagon traffic, which now congested ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... dank: and the walls were encrusted here and there with what seemed cobwebs; but proved to be saltpetre that had oozed out of the ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... a mild state of stupefaction turned away. Clat-clat! sang the little wooden shoes. A plaintive gonk rose as she prodded a laggard from the dank gutter. A piece of gold! Clat-clat! Clat-clat! Surely this had been a day of marvels; two crowns from the grand duke and a piece of gold from this old man in peasant clothes. Instinctively she knew that he was not a peasant. But what could he be? Comparison ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... during the heat of the day, to paddle along the shallows or sit and enjoy the cool air. There was always a breeze at the mouth of Corkscrew Gorge, and when it drew down, as it did on this day, it carried the odors of dank caverns. In the dark and gloomy depths of this gash through the hills the rocks were always damp and cold; and beneath the great waterfalls, where the cloudbursts had scooped out pot-holes, there was a delicious mist and spray. She dawdled by the willows, then splashed on up the ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... because it was a convenient, roomy hollow. No one knows how it started—perhaps the wood-peckers could tell you—but rain had certainly finished its excavation. The entrance was some thirty feet above the ground—dank, noisome, and forbidding; the end was ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... of rushes which marked its border, a foul, dank smell rose up from the stagnant wilderness, as from impure water and decaying vegetation—an earthy, noisome smell which poisoned the ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... tried the liberty of circumstance only to learn to appreciate the liberty of law, to know that license is the foe of freedom. And, though the sophistry of passion in these books disgusted me, flowers of purest hue seemed to grow upon the dank and dirty ground. I thought she had cast aside the slough of her past life, and began a new existence beneath the sun of a ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... hedgerows still allowed to grow in bushy beauty and to spread out coral fruit for the birds. Little details gave each field a particular physiognomy, dear to the eyes that have looked on them from childhood: the pool in the corner where the grasses were dank and trees leaned whisperingly; the great oak shadowing a bare place in mid-pasture; the high bank where the ash-trees grew; the sudden slope of the old marl-pit making a red background for the burdock; the huddled roofs and ricks of the homestead without a traceable way of approach; the ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... possessing him before he ended. Through the awful minutes that followed, not another sound than the hissing breath escaped through his set lips; his face was not once distorted, though the hair and beard clung round it, matted and dank with the sweat of agony. The brave heart and iron nerve ruled the body to the last imperially—supreme ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... caves black shadows lie That shall be lifted never more. Come, I Enter! Know thou what treasure by the sea I gathered other time." Therewith showed he Hid 'mong the high heaped rocks a dusky grot Where never sunshine fell. A dismal spot Where dank the sea-weeds coiled and cold the air Swept through. And stooping, Eblis downward rolled Before her webs of woven stuff, in fold Of purple sheen, enwrought with flecks of gold. Great wefts of scarlet and of blue, thick strewn With pearls, or cleft with discs of jacinth stone; ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... and down to the back door together. The house was large, but it was servantless now, and desolate. At the back was a small bricked house-yard, and beyond that a big square, gravelled fine and red, and having stables on two sides. Sloping, dank, winter-dark fields stretched away on the ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... dead with the shock, so terrible and hideous was it. Yet she did not. She neither shrieked nor fainted; but no poor January fieldfare was ever colder, no ice-house more dank with perspiration, than ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... madness slips From off him and he falls, quite weak, his lips Dropping with foam. When once we saw him fall So timely, we were at him one and all To pelt and smite. The other watched us come, But knelt and wiped those lips all dank with foam And tended the sick body, while he held His cloak's good web above him for a shield; So cool he was to ward off every stone And all the while care for ...
— The Iphigenia in Tauris • Euripides
... together, a new carpeting of turf to shield it from wind and sun and scouring rain. Gradually it becomes altogether barren. The washing of the soil from the mountains leaves bare ridges of sterile rock, and the rich organic mould which covered them, now swept down into the dank low grounds, promotes a luxuriance of aquatic vegetation, that breeds fever, and more insidious forms of mortal disease, by its decay, and thus the earth is rendered no longer fit for the habitation ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... olive and looked up. Directly in range stood the strange young man, although he was at the far side of the loft. He was leaning against a window frame, his hat in his hand. She noted the dank hair on his forehead, the sweat of revolting nature. ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... weak and sore, and shuddering at the remembrance of what I had gone through on the preceding day. The sun was shining brightly, but it had not yet risen high enough to show its head above the trees which fenced the eastern side of the dingle, on which account the dingle was wet and dank, from the dews of the night. I kindled my fire, and, after sitting by it for some time to warm my frame, I took some of the coarse food which I have already mentioned; notwithstanding my late struggle, and the coarseness of the fare, I ate with appetite. My provisions had by this ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... place of heat, with the same effect upon the atmosphere. Unhealthy exhalations are thus avoided, and the salubrity of the climate is increased; but the European will sometimes sigh for the soft, balmy airs of his own land, which have come flying over the sea, and seem to bring their wings still dank with the ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 3. (of 7): Media • George Rawlinson
... lown, and the stars sat still A-glintin' doon the sky: And the sauls crept oot o' their mooly graves, A' dank wi' lyin' by. ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... in the touching words of our Dutch translator with whom I'm sure you'll heartily agree: Toch ben ik er mijn landgenooten dank baar voor, die mijn arbeid steeds zoo welwillend outvangen en wier genegenheid ik ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... of virtuous father virtuous son, Now that the fields are dank and ways are mire, Where shall we sometimes meet, and by the fire Help waste a sullen ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... it rose at intervals, though the clearance was only momentary, and had scarcely become perceptible before reinforcements of dull white vapour, tainted with miasma, rolled up from the marshy ground, bringing dank odours of standing water and weedy vegetation, half decayed, and gradually encroaching on the river, the smooth surface of which glowed with a greasy gleam beneath it, making it look like ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... red as they inspected the timbering above, and saw that the sparse stulls, caps, and columns were still holding their own, and that the heavy porphyritic formation would scarcely have given had the timbers rotted away. Dank, glistening walls and a tremulous waving blackness were ahead of them as they cautiously invaded the long-deserted precincts, scraping and striking here and there with their prospector's picks in search ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... diluted this-morning's leader, to distract or offend me. The old shabby church showed, as usual, its quaint extent of roofage and the relievo skeleton on one gable, still blackened with the fire of thirty years ago. A chill dank mist lay over all. The Old Greyfriars' churchyard was in perfection that morning, and one could go round and reckon up the associations with no fear of vulgar interruption. On this stone the Covenant was signed. In that vault, as the story goes, John Knox took hiding ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... leaves it to go south. Nothing can efface from my mind the picture of it as I saw it when first going to the Caucasus. The sunset illumined it with the hues of romance. All the multiplicity of its dingy buildings shone as if lit up from within, and their dank and mouldy greens and blues and yellows became burning living colours. The town lay spread out upon the high banks of the Don and every segment of it was crowned with a church. The gilt domes blazed in the ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... measured stroke, dying noises from a dead past swelling and sinking, sinking and swelling, like falling and failing surf on a wreck-strewn beach. Ah, me! where be the ships, the proud, white-sailed ships, the rich-laden ships, whose broken timbers and splintered spars lie now dank, weed-grown, sand-covered, on that sorrowful shore, on that mournfully ...
— Holiday Tales - Christmas in the Adirondacks • W. H. H. Murray
... had compensated for physical weakness, and, uncomplaining, she had borne up against the hardships of the preceding ten hours. She was pale and harassed; her hair, uncurled by the night fogs, hung in dank masses round her face, and her fragile form was unable to maintain its upright position. Micaela, the waiting-maid, yawned incessantly, and audibly groaned at each rough stumble or uncomfortable movement of her mule. Several times during the drowsy morning ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... dank woods and where the meadows gleam, The lowliest flower that smiled To wisdom's vigil or to fancy's dream Thy ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... ancestral home, the ghostly hand of memory had conjured up pictures of long ago:—her own, her husband's and her brother's arrest here in this very room, the weeping servants, the rough, half-naked soldiery—then the agony of a nine days' imprisonment in a dark, dank prison-cell filled to overflowing with poor wretches in the same pitiable plight as herself—the hasty trial, the insults, the mockery:—her husband's death in prison and her ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... with a nod and a grin. His hat had gone, and the dank wisps of his hair were being fluttered about like black rags; his narrow slits of eyes were heavily bloodshot; his face was grimy and pale, his hands grimy and red; his clothing was a wreck. He looked ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... As he lay there he heard the thudding of hooves on the ground. He rose, dizzy and unnerved, to see the dim shapes of some cattle that had gathered down about the place from the upland. He felt the rain beating upon his face, the clothes hung dank and clammy to his limbs. His boots soaked and slopped when he stepped. A boom of thunder sounded overhead and a vivid flash of lightning lit up for an instant a great elm tree. He saw all its branches shining with water, drops glistening along a thousand ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... ashore there, to live and be a permanent citizen. And when he was landed, he found that his dancing place was only a barren rock where the seagulls mourned. Past the glamour of the sun and sea mists, there were only cold, searching winds and dank stone.... ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... bridal hope Before her crown'd with flowers; The orange blossoms took the hue With which the cypress dank with ...
— Man of Uz, and Other Poems • Lydia Howard Sigourney
... which was entered through a rustic porch, covered with ivy; very old and rampant it was, and its deep heavy foliage, so densely green, had a pall-like look, as it rustled and sighed in the sharp keen air. It was flanked by two cypress trees, well-shaped and well-grown. Dank ivy and deep cypress where the living Nell would have twined roses and passion-flowers! You see the old door-way when under the porch; it is of no particular order, but massive and pointed,—the hall is like the usual entrance to old-fashioned ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... were whispering through the wood, The rolling rill ran 'round the ragged rock; The shepherd, with his sunny, smiling face, Was far away to feed his flitting flock. Deep in the dingle, dank ...
— The Rover Boys at College • Edward Stratemeyer
... once been little better than a wilderness was now a wide and well-kept park. The rose pleasaunce had been restored to its pristine glory. The lawns were smooth-shaven and glowing in their rich emerald-green. The lakes and ponds were no longer overgrown with dank rushes; but had been reclaimed from being little better than marshes into bright expanses of clear water, where fish swam and swans loved to sport. Long avenues and cool, shadowy walks wound far away through the groves; and the stately oaks and ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... world. Down and down the projection plunged, through mile after mile of reeking, steaming fog, impenetrable to earthly eyes. Finally it came to rest upon the surface, hundreds of feet deep in a lush, dank, tropical jungle, and Brandon ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... soft lays: Others, on silver lakes and rivers, bathed Their downy breasts; the swan with arched neck Between her white wings, mantling proudly, rows Her state with oary feet; yet oft they quit The dank, and, rising on stiff pennons, tower The mid aerial sky: others on ground Walked firm; the crested cock, whose clarion sounds The silent hours; and the other, whose gay train Adorns him, colored with the florid hue Of rainbows ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... never so unlovely, exhaled faint wreaths of vapour that caused old-fashioned folk to shake their heads and to speak of full graveyards. The sun seemed to draw up in the form of mist more and more of the water that had been soaking into the soil. People moved about in a dank haze, that rose gradually to the tops of the houses, until by noontime it had obscured the moist blue sky and turned the sun into a dull-red disk set in a golden aura. There was something ominous in the strange atmosphere thus engendered, in ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... and the things they did were varied and remarkable. Sometimes they would disappear into the woods above Muirtown, and return home very dirty, very tired, very happy, laden with wild flowers and dank, earthy roots, which they planted in their tiny garden and watered together with tender solicitude. Other times they played what was supposed to be golf over a course of their own selection and creation at the top of the Meadow, and if by any chance ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... in his mind a clammy memory of the sort of housing he had known in those evil days, and he shuddered inwardly, smelling again the effluvia of dank oilcloth and musty carpets, of fish-balls and fried ham, of old-style plumbing and of nine-dollar-a-week humanity in the unwashen raw—the odour of misery that permeated the lodgings to which his lack of means had ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... rickety old gate with care, and he closed it after them; then they walked out over the dank leaves, through the brilliant coloring of the forest. The day was soft and tempting, while a mellow haze ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... [Daniel always got under way slowly, as though fore-resolved not to stampede.] Echo demands, "Retreat?—The Iron Brigade in retreat?" 'Twas true. Rallied once again, but under another flag than the Bars, the Missourians rode all that dank, wet night lest they meet and have to fight their new friends, the guerrillas under Rodrigo Galan. It was a weird predicament. Two days before, they were peaceful settlers in the land—omne solum forti patria—their blood-flecked ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... of water half a mile in length, then the river was hidden from view, for in its course from the mountains through the heavily-jungled littoral it took many bends and twists, sometimes running swiftly over rocky, gravelly beds, sometimes flowing noiselessly through deep, muddy-bottomed pools and dank, steamy swamps, the haunt ...
— John Corwell, Sailor And Miner; and, Poisonous Fish - 1901 • Louis Becke
... long delayed, When hours were minutes all too brief, For Nature knew no sound of grief; But overhead the breezes played, And in the dank grass at our knee, Shone pearls of our green forest sea, The star-white flowers of triple leaf Which love around the brooks to be, Within the birch and ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell
... voice which seemed to come from a profound abyss began to dictate: "Von al-len Lei-den-shaf-ten die grau-samste ist. Have you written that?" He paused, took a pinch of snuff, and began again: "Die grausamste ist die Un-dank-bar-keit [The most cruel of all passions is ingratitude.] a capital ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... there (so my sister Harriet warned me) serpents swarmed, eager to bite runaway boys. "And if you step in the mud between the tufts of grass," she said, "you will surely sink out of sight."—At night this teeming bog became a place of dank and horrid mystery. Bears and wolves and wildcats were reported as ruling the dark woods just beyond—only the door yard and the road seemed safe for little men—and even there I wished my mother to ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... of this. Another spectacle appears to his fancy, commands his eyes. Four walls, bare and dank, enclose a narrow cell, lighted by a single streak of day. On the moist and noisome floor is a mat; on the mat an old man dying. Beaten down by fever, he lies and looks about him, calling a name, in strangling voice, with tears. No one—a clanking ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... Dank straw from dunghill gathered,— Margerie! Where fragrant swine have made their bed, Thereon her body shall be ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... light in it; and in the other she held a small slip of a cherry-tree, but it had no bloom on it. Her dress was white, or had been; for the skirts of it, and her mantle, were draggled and sodden, and her green shoes stained and torn, and her long fair hair lay limp and dank upon her mantle whose hood had fallen away, and the shadows round her blue eyes were as black as pools under hedgerows thawing after a frost, and her lovely face was as white as the snowbanks they bed in. Behind her came another woman in a duffle cloak, a crone ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... tints were ripening in the canoe-birch leaves, and the tremulous whisper of autumn was in the rustle of the aspen trees. The poplars were yellowing, the ash were blood red with fruit, and in cool, dank thickets wild currants were glossy black and lusciously ripe. It was the season which Jolly Roger loved most of all, and it was the beginning of Peter's first September. The days were still hot, ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... the equinoctial sun,... By vapours, through whose threatening ominous veil Darting his altered influence he has gained This height of noon—from which he must decline 50 Amid the darkness of conflicting storms, To dank extinction and to latest night... There goes The apostate Strafford; he whose titles whispered aphorisms 55 From Machiavel and Bacon: and, if Judas Had been as brazen and ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... one side like a lame hen, gave access to a dark passage, dank with moisture, whereon the door of the house gave some eighteen feet ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... who was as brave as a bull-dog, thrust his horse into the path, while the Abbot sat shivering outside. "Certain nobles of higher rank," says Peter de Blois, "followed his example, not wishing to rust their armor, or tear their fine clothes, in the dank copse." ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... last seen riding down the street at Caylus, smiling back at us, and waving his adieux to his mistress! Beside the Vidame he had the air of being slight, even short. The face which I had known so bright and winning, was now white and set. His fair, curling hair—scarce darker than Croisette's—hung dank, bedabbled with blood which flowed from a wound in his head. His sword was gone; his dress was torn and disordered and covered with dust. His lips moved. But he held up his head, he bore himself bravely with it all; so bravely, that ...
— The House of the Wolf - A Romance • Stanley Weyman
... chaffer about settlements. I do not regret the gold to which you so delicately allude. I sorrow only for the bloom that has been brushed from the soaring pinions of a pure and disinterested affection. Sunt lacrymae rerum, and the handkerchief in which I bury my face is dank with them. ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... silence of the cold, dull night, The hum of armies gathering rank on rank! Lo! dusky masses steal in dubious sight Along the leaguer'd wall and bristling bank Of the arm'd river, while with straggling light The stars peep through the vapours dim and dank, Which curl in curious wreaths:—how soon the smoke Of Hell shall pall them in ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... forest and the lake had been out all night. For seventy miles of Canadian wilderness only the mountains and the forest and the lake stood actually convicted of having been out all night. Dank and white with its vaporous vigil the listless lake kindled wanly to the new day's breeze. Blue with cold a precipitous mountain peak lurched craggedly home through a rift in the fog. Drenched with mist, bedraggled with dew, a green-feathered ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott |
