"Dank" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Nymphs, Looms, distaffs, all such things as mortal craft Fashioneth. Wondrous seem they unto men Which pass into that hallowed cave. It hath, Up-leading and down-leading, doorways twain, Facing, the one, the wild North's shrilling blasts, And one the dank rain-burdened South. By this Do mortals pass beneath the Nymphs' wide cave; But that is the Immortals' path: no man May tread it, for a chasm deep and wide Down-reaching unto Hades, yawns between. This track the Blest Gods may alone behold. So died a host on either side that warred Over ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... seen by itself, and, indeed, needs the surroundings of its native haunts to display its fullest beauty. Its favorite abode is along the dank mossy stones of some black and winding brook, shaded with overarching bushes, and running one long stream of scarlet with these superb occupants. It seems amazing how anything so brilliant can mature ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... sixty days through this inner womb of the true tropical forest." The mind of man with difficulty endeavours to realise this immensity of wooded wilderness, covering a territory half as large again as the whole of France, where the rays of the sun never penetrate, where in the dark, dank air, filled with the steam of the heated morass, human beings dwarfed into pygmies and brutalised into cannibals lurk and live and die. Mr Stanley vainly endeavours to bring home to us the full horror of that awful ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... long ride had been an exertion as unusual as it was trying. But a resolute spirit 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 hours, she had nearly fallen from ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... Nacht denket an euch mein Lied, Wo mein ewiger Gram jeglichen Stundenschlag, Welcher naeher mich bringt dem Trauten Grabe, mit Dank begruesst.[56] ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... Sarah Dean. Her thin face blazed a scarlet wedge between the sleek curtains of her dank hair; perspiration stood on her triangle of forehead. "It is the hottest day I ever knew!" she said, defiantly, and there was open rebellion in ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... thoroughly her material of shape or color, or how to work it up. Not an ill-chosen fancy, either, that of the moist, warm month. Some tranced summer's day might have drowsed down into such a human form by a dank pool, or on the thick grass-crusted meadows. There was the full contour of the limbs hid under warm green folds, the white flesh that glowed when you touched it as if some smothered heat lay beneath, the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... beside Mamma a long way off. She could see them looking at each other. Roddy and Dank were ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... back, and he sat down and rested after his toil. It was not really so comfortable a seat as one of the school forms, but the satisfaction was to find anything at all that would serve for a chair. He sat there, still panting after the climb and his struggle through the dank and jungle-like thicket, and he felt as if he were growing hotter and hotter; the sting of the nettle was burning his hand, and the tingling fire seemed to spread all ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... the moor-birds protested against this invasion of their haunts. The moon came slowly up over the eastern end of the moor, flinging a silver radiance abroad, and softening the shadows cast by the hills. A strange, dank smell rose from the mossy ground—the scent of rotting heather and withered grass, mixed with the beautiful perfume from beds ...
— The Underworld - The Story of Robert Sinclair, Miner • James C. Welsh
... which her fancy began to dwell on the problems of ideal love. In this dead season the letters of Radway were more than ever an excitement. They stirred her imagination with pictures of burning seas and lurid tropical sunsets, and with this pageantry the memory of him would invade the dank gloom of the library where she and Considine pursued the acquisition ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... 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 elms ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... ONE dank, wet, clammy afternoon at the beginning of October half a dozen of the boarders at Briarcroft Hall stood at the Juniors' sitting-room window, watching the umbrellas of the day girls disappear through the side gate. It had been drizzling since dinner-time, and the prospect outside was not a remarkably ...
— The Leader of the Lower School - A Tale of School Life • Angela Brazil
... greater part of each year is excessively moist. Periodic rains bring deluge and periodic tornadoes play havoc. The dry seasons give partial relief, but they bring occasional blasts from the desert so dry and burning that all nature droops and is grateful at the return of the rains. The general dank heat stimulates vegetable growth in every scale from mildew to mahogany trees, and multiplies the members of the animal kingdom, be they mosquitoes, elephants or boa constrictors. There would be abundant food but for the superabundant creatures that struggle ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... 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 ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... a musty old place, without even as much tidiness as is usually found in barns, and there was a dank smell about it, as though generations of haymows had decayed there. There were holes in the floor, and in the dusk of early evening it was necessary for us to pick our way with the greatest care. It occurred ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... 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 day, what may be won From the hard season gaining? Time will run On smoother, till Favonius reinspire The frozen earth, and clothe in fresh attire The lily and rose, that ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... line went on fairly enough for some miles, over hillocks of hardwood, and across marshes of dank evergreens, where logs had been laid lengthwise for dry footing. At last Arthur thought he must be drawing near to a clearing, for light appeared through the dense veil of trees before him, as if some extensive break to the vast continuity of forest ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... she struggles on, Breasting the cold, dank rain, And, heavy and chill, the mist from the hill Sweeps down upon ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... an occasional policeman, twirling his night-stick. On the wharves the daylight confusion was dispelled; there was no clatter of teaming, no sound but the water fingering dank piles, and the little noises aboard sleeping vessels. But the Celestine was awake. Lights gleamed aboard her, men were stirring, the great mass of her canvas blotted half the stars. She was sailing, that night, ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... Katharine; and after they had stared at each other for a long while, he rode away in silence. It was through a dank and tear-flawed world that she stumbled conventward, while out of the east the sun came bathed in mists, a watery sun no brighter ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... madly dark the dank cell, Where somebody's boy Is writhing in torture, the veriest ...
— Mother Truth's Melodies - Common Sense For Children • Mrs. E. P. Miller
... held only a club as a means of defense. He was in rags. His black hair hung in dank locks about his ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... extend beyond the meadows, but 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 a river ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... subdued on the deck below, and their movements were languid. That tropical daybreak was chilly. The Malay quartermaster, coming up to get something from the lockers on the bridge, shivered visibly. The forests above and below and on the opposite bank looked black and dank; wet dripped from the rigging upon the tightly stretched deck awnings, and it was in the middle of a shuddering yawn that I caught sight of Almayer. He was moving across a patch of burned grass, a blurred, shadowy shape with the blurred ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... bird sitting on the stone, The dank moss dripping from the wall, The thorn-trees gaunt, the walks o'ergrown, I love them—how I love ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... felt the good dank air that clothes by night the broad East Anglian lands, and came again to some old perilous pool where the soft green mosses grew, and there plunged downward and downward into the dear dark water till it felt ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... 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
... southern limb of that gigantic 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 plugged into ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... Whatever the furious storm might dare, A wonderful, hook-nosed bright-eyed fellow In a thin brown cape and a cap of yellow That perched on his dripping coal-black hair. A red scarf set off his throat and bound him, Crossing his breast, and, winding round him, Flapped at his flank In a red streak dank; And his hose were red, with a purple sheen From his tunic's blue, and his shoes were green. He was most outlandishly patched together With ribbons of silk and tags of leather, And chains of silver and buttons of stone, And knobs of amber and polished bone, And a turquoise brooch and a collar of ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann
... foundations by exposure in the night-air and the dew." "And while you receive no further compensation in return," said John, "than, perhaps, the coy turning up of a lamp at an upper casement where the jasmine climbs; or an exasperating patter of invisible palms; or a huge dank wedge of fruit-cake shoved at you by the old man, through a ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... see the ink-bottle there?" quoth Charles to himself. Rising from the books he ran through the cloisters to a certain part, and there, by a dexterous spring, perched himself on to the frame of the open mullioned windows. The gravestones lay pretty thick in the square, enclosed yard, the long, dank grass growing around them; but there appeared to be ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... tank dell ill card veal rank tell bill hard meal sank well fill bark neat hank yell rill dark heat dank belt hill dint bang dime rave cull hint fang lime gave dull lint gang tine lave gull mint hang fine pave hull tint rang ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... 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 ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... him from the narrow ledge and bear him away. And the farther they went on the more fearful the place seemed to grow. The walls dripped with moisture, as a result of the spray which rose from the hurrying race, and shut them in back and front with a gloomy mist, which struck cold and dank as it moistened their faces and ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... yet nothing could spoil the wonderful color of her hair and eyes, nor take away the peculiar grace of her figure. Her expression was dull and listless. Even so Mollie looked like a lily transplanted to some field of dank weeds, but growing tall and ...
— Madge Morton, Captain of the Merry Maid • Amy D. V. Chalmers
... played Over dead and dying; Piped and played he well. Sure that flute of his was made Of the dank reed sighing O'er the streams of Hell. There beneath the shadows grey, With the sisters three, Shall he pipe for many a day. May the Frog his butler be! And his wine the water of that countrie— ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... dry space with a lofty, salt-icicled roof. The green, translucent sea, as it rolled back and forth at their feet, gave to their brown faces a ghastly white glare. The scavenger crabs scrambled away over the dank and dripping stones, and the loathsome biting eel, slowly reached out its well-toothed, wide-gaping jaw to tear the tender feet that roused it from its horrid lair, where the dread sea ...
— Hawaiian Folk Tales - A Collection of Native Legends • Various
... It opened into a high-banked macadamized avenue bordered by broken wooden sidewalks. The vast flat land began to design itself, as the sun faded out behind the irregular lines of buildings two miles to the west. A block south, a huge red chimney was pouring tranquilly its volume of dank smoke into the air. On the southern horizon a sooty cloud hovered above the mills of South Chicago. But, except for the monster chimney, the country ahead of the two was bare, vacant, deserted. The avenue traversed empty lots, mere squares of sand and marsh, ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... 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 broad gravel-walk ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... 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 certain ladies, rather disconcerted him at first. But he warmed to his work, and in deliberate, mathematical fashion wrought through his subject. He told of the long Night; the dark age of the North Sea. The little shivering cabin-boy lay on his dank wooden couch, and curled under the wrench of the bitter winter nights; he had to bear a hard struggle for existence, and, if he were a weakling, he soon went under. Alas! there had been instances, only too well authenticated, of boys being subjected to the most shocking treatment—though ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... and remote cabins which sent their smoke curling into the dank morning air of the region thereabouts, there was not one in which disease was not already raging with fearful malignity. Doctors or hired nurses there were none; each stricken household was forced to battle single-handed with the destroyer ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... their acquaintance with his own when he had been foiled at every fair attempt to learn theirs, Lorry could only mumble his acknowledgments. In all his life he had never lost command of himself as at this moment. Guggenslocker! He could feel the dank sweat of disappointment starting on his brow. A butcher,—a beer maker,—a cobbler,—a gardener,—all synonyms of Guggenslocker. A sausage manufacturer's niece—Miss Guggenslocker! He tried to glance unconcernedly at her as he took up his ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... Pass—in the Jungle! I knew the place, a spot of dank pestilence and mystery. "You never could have ...
— New Burlesques • Bret Harte
... many sides. Perhaps, finally, other cities following the lead of Cincinnati will introduce the kindergarten spirit and kindergarten activities into the lower grades where they will clarify an atmosphere, fetid and dank with concepts which to the six-year-old are ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... bottom of the stairway, and Joan de Tany led him, gropingly, across what seemed, from their echoing footsteps, a large chamber. The air was chill and dank, smelling of mold, and no ray of light penetrated this subterranean vault, and no ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... many shocks of electricity, while the perspiration produced by my late violent exertions congealed in icy beads upon my forehead. My thirst was gone, and I fairly loathed the water. Starting to my feet, the sight of those dank rocks, oozing forth moisture at every crevice, and the dark stream shooting along its dismal channel, sent fresh chills through my shivering frame, and I felt as uncontrollable a desire to climb up towards the genial sunlight as I before ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... Swings as the elm-tree waves his crest— And the lithe cricket, and the hoar And huge-limb'd hound that guards the door, Look'd on when, as a summer wind That, passing, leaves no trace behind, All unapparell'd, barefoot all, She ran to that old ruin'd wall, To leave upon the chill dank earth (For ah! she never knew its worth) 'Mid hemlock rank, and fern, and ling, And dews ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... Radisson had sprained his ankle; and the long portages by the banks of the ice-laden, rain-swollen rivers were terrible. The rocks were slippery as glass with ice and moss. The forests of this region are full of dank heavy windfall that obstructs the streams and causes an endless succession of swamps. In these the paddlers had to wade to mid-waist, 'tracking' their canoes through perilous passage-way, where the rip of an upturned branch might tear the birch from the bottom of the canoe. When the ...
— The "Adventurers of England" on Hudson Bay - A Chronicle of the Fur Trade in the North (Volume 18 of the Chronicles of Canada) • Agnes C. (Agnes Christina) Laut
... loose 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 fixedly ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... day! Dull, cold, dank, and misty—the spit of an 11th of November at home. Not even a shell from Long Tom to liven it. The High Street looks doubly dead; only a sodden orderly plashes up its spreading emptiness on a sodden horse. The roads are like rice-pudding already, and ...
— From Capetown to Ladysmith - An Unfinished Record of the South African War • G. W. Steevens
... and canebrakes swept past them. In those tangles of gnarled trees, matted vines, interlacing rank grasses, and clusters of towering plants, so dank with the odor of wet and decay that the air even up where the flyers were seemed charged with it, lurked many a monster reptile and ferocious beast. Often the four boys saw the majestic form of a lion or the lumbering ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... enjoying a short walk and composing a Canon, "Grossen Dank, / / /," when, on returning home, with the intention of writing it out for Y.R.H., I find a petitioner who is under the delusion that his request will be better received if made through me. What can ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826 Vol. 2 • Lady Wallace
... you knew him?" Latimer enquired, the wretched, dank little figure suddenly assuming the haunting air of something his eye must have rested ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... 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 ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... looking 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
... it better to begin their work by covering the features with a cap or a broad-brimmed hat. It was difficult for the coarsest of them to fling a spadeful of dank clay directly upon the wide-open ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... Between each ring of buildings and the one next inside it there were lagoons, lawns and groves—lagoons of tepid, sullenly-steaming water; lawns which were veritable carpets of lush, rank rushes and of dank mosses; groves of palms, gigantic ferns, bamboos, and numerous tropical growths unknown to Earthly botany. At the very edge of the city began jungle unrelieved and primeval; the impenetrable, unconquerable ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... 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, and of their ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... level green lawn, with sedate paths marching around it, but no black hooded figures were moving there in ones or twos or in solemn file, as I had been wont to see them. I walked rather uncertainly forward across the grass, across the dank and mossy paths, and into the shadowy length of the corridor. This, too, was empty, and at one end of it a little door, with a grill across it, seemed as effectually to bar me out as the Spanish Woman's house had shut me in. In my dazed state the only thing I could think of doing, to call the attention ...
— The Other Side of the Door • Lucia Chamberlain
... Roughly it may be located at latitude 7 deg. north and longitude 5 deg. west, which a reference to any modern atlas will show to lie on the Ashanti coast of to-day. It was a hot, moist country, where huge antediluvian animals lived in reedy swamps and dank forests. The fossil remains of such plants are to-day found in the coal measures. The Rmoahals were a dark race—their complexion being a sort of mahogany black. Their height in these early days was about ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... his crucifixes stands deep in the Klamm, in the dank gorge where it is always half-night. The road runs under the rock and the trees, half-way up the one side of the pass. Below, the stream rushes ceaselessly, embroiled among great stones, making an endless loud noise. The rock face opposite rises ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... from the fire escapes Or sprawl over the stoops... Upturned faces glimmer pallidly— Herring-yellow faces, spotted as with a mold, And moist faces of girls Like dank white lilies, And infants' faces with open parched mouths that suck at the air as at ...
— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... it grew chill as the Gryxabodill Raised his dank, dripping fins to the skies To plead with the Plunk for the use of her bill To pick the ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... the entrance, the channel narrowed to a muddy creek, not more than twenty yards wide, with high trees, and thick underwood close to the water's edge. All was silent, the sun shone clown upon us like the concentrated rays of a burning glass, and there was no breeze to dissipate the heavy dank mist that hovered over the surface of the unwholesome canal, nor was there any appearance of a living thing, save and except a few startled waterfowl, and some guanoes on the trees, and now and then an alligator, like a black log of charred ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... the overflowing fulness, the surplusage, of light rather than mist. The shadows of the great trees were interlaced with dazzling silver gleams. The night was almost as bright as the day, but cool and dank, full of sylvan fragrance and restful silence and ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... respect we must have seen Verona under a disadvantage: there was no sunshine during our short stay. The beautiful, lordly gardens of the Palazzo Giusti on the declivity of a hillside on the left bank of the Adige were dank and dripping; there was no temptation to linger near their chilly statues and gloomy cypresses; even the view from their noble terraces, formed partly by the wall of the town, was cold and colorless under the November ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... ill-lighted. He looked about him, the dank, close air was unwashed by daylight. A stray ray of sunshine filtering through the broken shutter slanted across the room and sought vainly to dispel the shadow. He thought of Dr. Holcomb and the old lady. "Now there are two." Was ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... as to the exact meaning of the request to wear "full dress" may be gathered from Mrs. Abe Tutts's observation, while drying a few dank hairs at Mrs. Jackson's front gate, that it was lucky she had not ripped up her accordion-pleated skirt which was as full as anybody could wear and ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... long breath, she pushed her dank hair back into her hood and pressed her hand upon her heart. Then she was calm a while, but a new terror set it throbbing again. Close beside her—this time at her right—the loud laughter of men's harsh voices echoed ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... it breathed of freedom. She turned her face up to the dark boughs that met and interlaced above her head, and whispered her thankfulness. Then, obedient to Mr. Thomasson's impatient gesture, she hastened to follow him along a dank narrow path that skirted the wall of the house for a few yards, then turned off among ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman
... in fact, we have no longer any clothes and things that require such disposal. But in the bush everything must serve some purpose or other; and so all these now disused trunks are turned to use. One grand old imperial is now a brine-tub, within whose dank and salt recesses masses of beef and pork are always kept stored ready for use. Other cases hold sugar, salt, flour, and so on; a uniform case is now our bread-basket; each has its proper purpose, and is accomplishing its final destiny. There is a fine ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... place, and full of evil smells. Drops of water stood on the cold stone walls, and a green mould crept along the floor. The air was heavy and dank, and it began to be hard for Nick to breathe. The men in the dungeons were singing a horrible song, and in the corner was a half-naked fellow shackled to the floor. "Give me a penny," he said, "or I will ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... took the pistol from his pocket and, automatically releasing the safety, moved to the door, opening it with his left hand. The hall was unlighted; he could feel the pressure of the darkness above. The dank silence flowed over him like chill water rising above his heart. He turned, and a dim thread of light, showing through the chink of a partly closed doorway, led him swiftly forward. He paused a moment before entering, shrinking from ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... inquired about the rest of the family — I found Mrs Tabitha still delirious from her fright, discharging very copiously the water she had swallowed. She was supported by the captain, distilling drops from his uncurled periwig, so lank and so dank, that he looked like Father Thames without his sedges, embracing Isis, while she cascaded in his urn. Mrs Jenkins was present also, in a loose bed gown, without either cap or handkerchief; but she seemed to be as little compos mentis as her mistress, ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... but it must have been for weeks. My memories of what occurred invariably take the form of nightmare. For untold ages, oppressed by protean fear, I am aware of wandering, endlessly wandering, through a dank and soggy wilderness, where poisonous snakes struck at us, and animals roared around us, and the mud quaked under us ...
— Before Adam • Jack London
... our offerings, and derides our vows,—- "Oh! strike the diadem from his impious brows, "Tear from his murderous hand the bloody rod, 290 "And teach the trembling nations, "THOU ART GOD!"— —SYLPHS! in what dread array with pennons broad Onward ye floated o'er the ethereal road, Call'd each dank steam the reeking marsh exhales, Contagious vapours, and volcanic gales, 295 Gave the soft South with poisonous breath to blow, And rolled the dreadful whirlwind on the foe!— Hark! o'er the camp the venom'd tempest sings, Man falls on Man, on buckler buckler rings; Groan answers ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... square in shape, built of variously sized logs, and banked over with two or three feet of moss and grass-grown earth, so as to resemble an outdoor cellar. Half of one side had been torn down by storm-besieged travellers for firewood; its earthen floor was dank and wet with slimy tricklings from its leaky roof; the wind and rain drove with a mournful howl down through its chimney-hole; its door was gone, and it presented altogether a dismal picture of neglected dilapidation. ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... Madame only bowed her head from between the clasping hands that for the first time had distress instead of comfort for her groping soul. She did not pray for guidance. She never thought of praying. Why should she? The prisoned seed, buried in the dank and quickening soil, struggles instinctively toward the source of light and strength. But what instinct is there to guide the human soul that, quickened by unselfish love, is yet walled in by the Stygian ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... back and forth in the narrow dank cell. At the doorway the two guards opened and closed their jaws, regularly, rhythmically, about sixty to the minute. Hours, the two men calculated, they had been there. And still the clashing of those jaws rang ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... but hanging on the branch of a tree was a worn and mud-stained skirt. Do not ladies in hotels, in similar fashion, hang out their dusty and travel-soiled attire at the doors of their chambers? And perhaps the dark-skinned owner had hung up her dank and dripping weeds in the hope that some silvan faun or Robin Goodfellow would, without a tip, perform the dusting process, in this case so palpably necessary. We do wrong in supposing that imagination is not the ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... arms over their wretched lean aprons. 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 ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... he waited for the Indian to come, he noted that the edges of the hole, and all the bushes that over-hung its mouth were crusted thickly with white frost. Carefully he laid flat on his belly and edged himself along until he could thrust his face into the abyss. The air felt very warm—a dank, damp warmth, such as exudes from the depths of a swamp in summer. He peered downward but his eyes could not penetrate the Stygian blackness out of which rose the monotonous ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... looked up his moment of gentleness had passed. His easier moods were never of long duration. One swift glance again at the distant hill, and then he turned from it and sat gazing at the dank, oozy prospect of the low-lying flat he was just entering with no sort of friendliness. The sharp hoofs of his team were flinging mud in every direction, and the rattle of the wheels had deadened to a thick sucking as they sank into the black mud. It ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... the lead as before, followed by Roger and Tom, and Connel brought up the rear. They moved directly to the spot where they had last seen the tyrannosaurus, found the trampled underbrush and massive tracks, and moved purposefully into the dank, suffocating green world. ...
— The Revolt on Venus • Carey Rockwell
... not sounded when I first awoke and, rolling from my blanket, looked about me. Already a faint, dim line of gray, heralding the dawn, was growing clearly defined in the east, and making manifest those heavy fog-banks which, hanging dank and low, obscured the valley. The tired men of my troop were yet lying upon the ground, wrapped tightly in their blankets, oblivious of the deadly work before them; but I could hear the horses already moving uneasily at their ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish
... resounding ochreish station. Then, without warning or signal, it slipped off, as though casually, towards an undetermined goal. Often it ran level with the roofs of vague, far-stretching acres of houses— houses vile and frowsy, and smoking like pyres in the dank air. And always it travelled on a platform of brick arches. Now and then the walled road received a tributary that rounded subtly into it, and this tributary could be seen curving away, on innumerable brick arches, through the chimneypots, and losing itself in a ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... fairest and most flourishing village in the country, as well as the largest, is only about fifteen years old. Its population is six thousand. Forbidding-looking swamps, giving rise to swarming myriads of mosquitoes and to malaria through their dank, decaying vegetation, have been converted into flourishing cranberry-meadows, and the dry land into fine vineyards and fruit-orchards surrounding homes of every grade of elegance, from the simple vine-covered cottage to the costly ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... a glorious morning for sportsmen. One sniffed the dews, and could fancy fresh smells of stubble earth and dank woodland grass in the very streets of dirty Bevisham. Sound sleep, like hearty dining, endows men with a sense of rectitude, and sunlight following the former, as a pleasant spell of conversational ease or sweet music the latter, smiles a celestial approval ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... wonder'd what this thing might be, Shaped like a Horse it was; and many a stain There show'd upon the mighty beams of tree, For some with fire were blacken'd, some with rain Were dank and dark amid white planks of plane, New cut among the trees that now were few On wasted Ida; but men gazed in vain, Nor truth thereof ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang
... at Blakeney Sea pansies, sedge, and rosemary; Frail fronds thrust forth in dim dank air, A message from those lying there: Wan leaves ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... with life as there enjoyed; To brighter world they never had aspired, Had they not felt unfilled an aching void, And heard a whisper of a life attired In sapphire robes, 'midst gleams of golden light, Above their present world, so dank and chill, Where all day long they wing their happy flight From roses ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... the cold, dank fog, and the sheriff offered to bring a brazier of coals; but the great man proudly drew around him the cloak, now somewhat threadbare, that he had once spread for good Queen Bess to tread upon, and said, "It is the ague I contracted in America—the crowd will think it fear—I ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... weeds, And the willow branches hoar and dank, And the wavy swell of the soughing reeds, And the wave-worn horns of the echoing bank, And the silvery marish flowers that throng The desolate creeks and pools among, Were ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... he blew it deftly until the solid wood was aflame, and by the light of it he could see that Archer was ghastly pale and almost on the point of collapse. Their dank, unwholesome refuge seemed the more dreadful ...
— Tom Slade with the Boys Over There • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... woods, where the dusky trees Shut in the forest's sounding silences With close-twined boughs from which the breeze has blown The fragrance-breathing fragments of the cone. Deeply she drank the nectar of repose. Spreading her downy wings all veined with rose, Upon the gray-green mosses, cool and dank, Languished the sprite, and in a swoon she sank, While a delicious numbness born of death Stilled the soft wings that stirred with each faint breath. One summer morning, while the languid breeze Strayed with a languid murmur ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... door, and D'ri flung our "duds" into the darkness that lay beyond it. Then he made down the ladder, and I after him. It was pitch-dark in the cellar—a deep, dank place with a rank odor of rotting potatoes. We groped our way to a corner, and stood listening. We heard the tramp of horses in the dooryard and the clinic of spurs on the ...
— D'Ri and I • Irving Bacheller
... atmosphere collects That vapour dank, returning into water, Soon as it mounts where cold condenses it. That evil will, which in his intellect Still follows evil, came, and rais'd the wind And smoky mist, by virtue of the power Given by his nature. Thence the valley, ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... cried Jack in indignant schoolboy fashion. "Now don't talk so much, but creep between these bushes when nobody is passing. There's room for us both, and I can get a pull at the string between these branches. We'll have a rehearsal now, and see how it works." He crawled forward on the dank earth, in easy unconcern for the knees of his trousers, dropped the daintily-wrapped parcel on to the centre of the pavement, and crept back to his place, holding in his hand the end of a long ...
— Betty Trevor • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... large. He was already convinced, from very wide knowledge, experience, that the other could not form a permanent attachment to the Manchu; and Nettie's great difference, together with the romance of her unhappy position, must have a potent effect on the fellow's evident sentimentality. A dank air rose from the water, like the smell of death; and, with an uncontrollable shiver, he turned back toward ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... of the mountains, flowed the mighty rivers of South America, bordered by the vast, eternal tropic forest, with its dank, steaming moisture—the home of the fierce beast, the loathsome reptile, and insect plagues innumerable. Far up the mountains was the land of ice and snow, fierce biting wind, and sleety tempest, with here and there patches of verdure, the pastoral land of the vicuna and llama ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn
... wise. We were come to the spot, Bearing the dreadful burden of thy threats; And first with care we swept the dust away From round the corse, and laid the dank limbs bare: Then sate below the hill-top, out o' the wind, Where no bad odour from the dead might strike us, Stirring each other on with interchange Of loud revilings on the negligent In 'tendance on this duty. So we stayed Till in mid heaven the sun's resplendent orb Stood high, and the ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... in the log huts set in the midst of the forest a century ago. While his horizon was still bounded by the clearing that his ax had made, the pioneer dreamed of continental conquests. The vastness of the wilderness kindled his imagination. His vision saw beyond the dank swamp at the edge of the great lake to the lofty buildings and the jostling multitudes of a mighty city; beyond the rank, grass-clad prairie to the seas of golden grain; beyond the harsh life of the log hut and the sod house to the home of his children, where should dwell comfort and the higher ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... "Gott sei Dank!" Sammet rejoined. "Aber if I did got one, y'understand, I would got Verstand enough to pick out a healthy woman, which Dishkes does everything the same. He picks out a store there on an avenue when it is a dead neighbourhood, understand ...
— Elkan Lubliner, American • Montague Glass
... and saw that it was a fallen tree. The wound in the earth caused by its torn-up roots formed a sort of cavern where the slenderer tentacles hung limp like tropical foliage. If there was a means of entrance to this dank little shelter it must be from the farther side. Even where Gilbert stood the atmosphere was redolent of the damp earth of this crazy little retreat. For retreat it certainly was, because there was a light in it. Gilbert could only see the reflection of the light ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... said the President. "Things have got to such a pass, that in towns the meanest people have tea at the morning's meal, to the discontinuance of the ale which ought to be their diet; and poor women dank this drug also in the afternoons, to the exclusion of ...
— The Billow and the Rock • Harriet Martineau
... gay, and 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 ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... to mean them all!— The peach-dyed morn; cold stars in colder blue Gazing across upon the sun-dyed west, While the dank wind is running o'er the graves; Green buds, red flowers, brown leaves, and ghostly snow; The grassy hills, breeze-haunted on the brow; And sandy deserts hung with stinging stars! Half-vanished hangs the moon, with daylight sick, Wan-faced and lost and lonely: daylight fades— Blooms ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... splashes of light and colour. The air 'hangs heavy as remembered sin,' and the gloom of a great cathedral is on every side. Everything is damp, and moist, and oppressive. The soil, and the cool dead leaves under foot are dank with decay, and sodden to the touch. Enormous fungous growths flourish luxuriantly; and over all, during the long hot hours of the day, hangs a silence as of the grave. Though these jungles teem with life, no living thing is to ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... as, with his head on the dank, fishy pillow, he looked up in the glory above him, the stars were always there. Blurred sometimes by earthly mists and vapors, lost in the dazzling gleam of jewelled lights, darkened by the shadows of crooked trees, they shone with ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman
... the earth 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 ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... from under his feet, jumped back in alarm. Slowly there opened in the paneled oak wall a rectangular door, a door of large enough size to admit a man. From the recess beyond there came a breath of air, foul with the musty odor of decayed vegetation, dank as the air of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... the collar again and dug "The Winter's Tale" out of himself, and "Cymbeline," and seeing they were not his best, took breath, and brought forth "The Tempest"—another masterpiece, though written with a heart of lead and with the death-sweat dank on his forehead. Think of it; the noblest autumn fruit ever produced; all kindly-sweet and warm, bathed so to speak in love's golden sunshine; his last ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... 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 resounding shore of ...
— Holiday Tales - Christmas in the Adirondacks • W. H. H. Murray
... ueberall offen und bescheiden bekennt, dass man ganz von den Englaendern abhange: ja man scheitert gewiss, wenn man mit der einen Hand allen Stoff von dem man lebt und athmet ihnen entnimmt, und mit der andern zum Dank Hohn und Beleidigung auf ihren Namen wirft. Vorrede, ...
— The Works of William Shakespeare [Cambridge Edition] [9 vols.] - Introduction and Publisher's Advertising • William Shakespeare
... rapidly widened—there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind—the entire orb of the satellite burst at once upon my sight—my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder—there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters—and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the "House ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... there is nothing but night ahead for each. The Grey Angel 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 never known ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... them early astir and at work. Together they traversed the tropic-seeming woods, aflame with brilliant flowers, dank with ferns and ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... "Funny," as I'm wont, beneath the bank, Listening to Cam's rippling murmurs thro' the weeds and willows dank, As I chewed the Cud of fancy, from the water there appeared An old man, fierce-eyed, and filthy, with a long and tangled beard; To the oozy shore he paddled, clinging to my Funny's nose, Till, in all his mud majestic, Cam's gigantic form arose. Brawny, broad of shoulders was he, ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling
... with their soft caterpillar-like blossoms; the twigs of the swamp maple were flushed with ruddy bloom; the ash hung out its black tufts; the shad-bush seemed a wreath of snow; the white stars of the bloodroot gleamed among dank, fallen leaves; and in the young grass of the wet meadows the marsh-marigolds ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... said conclusively, exhibiting its sole, dank with dew. "Go up and put on a pair of dry shoes and then come down and sing ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... Potztausendhimmelsdonnerwetter! Oh, ich war ganz rasend! Wie ich aber rief: 'Meine Herren, ich kenne Sie nicht, und Sie kennen meinen Vater nicht, wissen Sie, denn er ist schon lange durchgebrannt, und geht nicht beim Tage in einen Laden hinein, wissen Sie—und ich habe keinen Schwiegervater, Gott sei Dank, werde auch nie einen kriegen, werde uberhaupt, wissen Sie, ein solches Ding nie haben, nie dulden, nie ausstehen: warum greifen Sie ein Madchen an, das nur Unschuld kennt, das Ihnen nie Etwas ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... clover heads nodded serenely to one another, gave a poignant anguish to his realization. He tore the rotting planks aside, and looked as it seemed, down into unrelieved blackness. Then his sun-dazzled vision adjusted itself to the gloom and he saw the dank, slime-covered stones that formed the sides of the well, and below the black gleam of water and something pink and white, that struggled and went under, ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... and gone, To the rice-swamp, dank and lone; There no mother's eye is near them, There no mother's ear can hear them; Never, when the torturing lash Seams their backs with many a gash, Shall a mother's kindness bless them, Or a mother's ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... tombs, without any covering to shelter them from the wind and rain, without bedding or sufficient food, with the dank grass for their couches and graves for pillows, did most of these unfortunates—from twelve to fifteen hundred—live during the succeeding five months. They were rigorously guarded night and day by sentinels who were held answerable with their lives for the safe keeping ...
— Hunted and Harried • R.M. Ballantyne
... November in London. The great city was buried under a dank, yellow fog. Traffic was temporarily checked; foot passengers groped their way by the light of the street lamps, and the hoarse shouts of the link boys running before cabs and carriages with blazing torches rang at intervals above the muffled rumble ...
— The River of Darkness - Under Africa • William Murray Graydon
... hearts glowing warm, Embarked on the billows far distant to rove, To bear to the nations all wrapped in thick gloom The lamp of the gospel—the message of love. But Wheelook now slumbers beneath the cold wave; And Coleman lies low in the dank, cheerless grave: ...
— Daughters of the Cross: or Woman's Mission • Daniel C. Eddy
... [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 swords as ploughshares fleshed in earth's warm bosom.... But tyrannical ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... rocks and sandy capes, it has wrested the whole of her secret from Nature yet. What a rich experience it must have gained, standing on one leg and looking out from its dull eye so long on sunshine and rain, moon and stars! What could it tell of stagnant pools and reeds and dank night-fogs! It would be worth the while to look closely into the eye which has been open and seeing at such hours, and in such solitudes, its dull, yellowish, greenish eye. Methinks my own soul must be a bright invisible green. I have seen these birds stand ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... months before, at Abbazia, when they had come up from sea-bathing in the Adriatic. He had leaned down over her, to help her up the Angiolina bath steps, wet and slippery with sea-water. The mingled gold and chestnut of her thick hair was dank and sodden with brine, the wistful face that she turned up to him was pinched and colorless and blue about the lips. She seemed, of a sudden, as she leaned heavily on his arm, a presaging apparition out of the dim future, an adumbration of her own ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... pastures, with 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 ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... of gloom—hopeless gloom—was depressing. Such mawkish sentimentality and despair; such inane and mortifying confessions; such longings for a lover to come; such sighings over a lover departed; such cravings for "only"—"only" a grave in some dark, dank solitude. As Mrs. Dodge puts it, "Pegasus generally feels inclined to pace toward a graveyard the moment he feels ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... 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 dimming and distorting of architectural lines, ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... A breeze, chill and dank as the breath of a tomb, blew upon the company, and from the deep darkness into which they all stared with straining, unseeing eyes, came the solemn sound of Mr. Smitz, speaking hurriedly in somber tones in some sonorous unknown tongue, and low ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis
... let him sleep awhile, and then to arouse him, and administer a suitable reproof for such a forgetfulness of duty. Now and then I walked the rounds among the silent horses, to see that all was right. The night was chill, damp, and dark, the dank grass bending under the icy dewdrops. At the distance of a rod or two the tents were invisible, and nothing could be seen but the obscure figures of the horses, deeply breathing, and restlessly ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... trace out for us the long successive periods during which the earth's surface was formed. Even in the Archaean age something in the form of life may have appeared. Perhaps vast masses of dank seaweed germinated as the earliest of plants in the steaming oceans. The water warred against the land, tearing and breaking at its rock formation and distributing it in new strata, each buried beneath the next and holding fast within it the fossilized remains that form the record of its history. ...
— The Dawn of Canadian History: A Chronicle of Aboriginal Canada • Stephen Leacock
... on an inscription in black letters, and, following the path indicated, we reached the dank tank where the monsters dwell. We had arrived at a place which I find it difficult to describe. The floor was ...
— HE • Andrew Lang
... work would be the world's masterpiece of morality as well as of art. Partiality is immorality; for any book is wrong that gives a misleading picture of the world and life. The trouble is that the weakling must be partial; the work of one proving dank and depressing; of another, cheap and vulgar; of a third, epileptically sensual; of a fourth, sourly ascetic. In literature as in conduct, you can never hope to do exactly right. All you can do is to make as sure as possible; and for that there is but ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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. ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... yards and he reached a wire fence. Stepping across it, he found himself in the next garden. Here he paused for a moment and listened. The house before which he stood was smaller than Pelham Lodge, and woefully out of repair. The grass on the lawn was long and dank—even the board containing the notice "To Let" had fallen flat, and lay among it as in a jungle. The paths were choked with weeds, the windows were black and curtainless. He made his way to the back of the house and suddenly stopped short. This ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... river moved in stealthy silence,—a dull thing of mystery, with only here and there a touch of silvery light upon its clouded surface. The cottonwoods and willows, on the opposite shore, were mere dreams of trees,—gray, formless, and weird. The air was filled with the dank earth-smell. The heavy thundering roar of the never-ending war of the waters at Elbow Rock came louder and more menacing, but strangely unreal, as if the mist itself were filled with ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... planted out for evermore in the dank and weedy little cemetery that lies on the outskirts of the station where he lived and died. Those golden curls, those soft and rounded limbs, and that laughing mouth, are given up to darkness and the eternal hunger of corruption. Through sunshine and rain, through ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... had made certain of its being something more than a passing appearance of sea or sky, and Morales was ready with his suggestion that this was Machin's island. The fog that hung over this part of the ocean would be natural to a thick and dank woodland like that on the island of his ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... It is a character which is, I believe, rarely found except where there has been toil to undergo and adversity to struggle against: it will only grow to perfection in a poor soil and in the shade; if the soil be too indigent, the shade too dank and thick, of course it dies where it sprung. But I trust this will not be the case with Miss Kavanagh. I trust she will struggle ere long into the sunshine. In you she has a kind friend to direct her, and I hope her mother will live to see the daughter, ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... the mystic grove. There stood the ancient and much slandered statues, overshadowed by tall larches, and stained by dank green mold. It is not a matter of surprise that strange figures, thus behoofed and be-horned, and set up in a gloomy grove, should perplex the minds of the simple and superstitious yeomanry. There are many of the tastes and caprices of the rich, ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... "Dank 'oo, I'm so dirsty," lisped the little man in affable acquiescence; and, the next moment, Jupp had spirited out a rough basket from under the seat in the corner, when extracting a tin can with a cork stopper therefrom, he put it on ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson
... There he lay, their bright agile boy, with eyes half closed and fixed, and circled half way down his cheeks with livid purple, like bruises, the purple lips emitting a heavy breath, his crest of sunny hair hanging dank with the melting of the ice on ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... only one straight passage from chamber to chamber. It was a simple matter to explore the entire cave. When they came at last into the third chamber they soon found themselves at the end of it, with the dank wall of stone ...
— Frank Merriwell's Pursuit - How to Win • Burt L. Standish |
