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Maelstrom   /mˈeɪlstrəm/   Listen
Maelstrom

noun
1.
A powerful circular current of water (usually the result of conflicting tides).  Synonyms: vortex, whirlpool.






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"Maelstrom" Quotes from Famous Books



... forms the canopy—occasionally a gorgeous one—of the more than Babel city. Stretching before me, the troubled breast of the mighty river, and, immediately below, the main whirlpool of the Thames—the Maelstrom of the bulwarks of the middle arch—a grisly pool, which, with its superabundance of horror, fascinated me. Who knows but I should have leapt into its depths?—I have heard of such things—but for a rather startling occurrence which ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow

... axis, circulation, roll; circumrotation^, circumvolution, circumgyration^; volutation^, circination^, turbination^, pirouette, convolution. verticity^, whir, whirl, eddy, vortex, whirlpool, gurge^; countercurrent; Maelstrom, Charybdis; Ixion. [rotating air] cyclone; tornado, whirlwind; dust devil. [rotation of an automobile] spin-out. axis, axis of rotation, swivel, pivot, pivot point; axle, spindle, pin, hinge, pole, arbor, bobbin, mandrel; axle shaft; gymbal; hub, hub of rotation. [rotation and ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... has, occasionally, plunged into the maelstrom of reform and proved to such objectors that he can work as efficiently as they. Thomas Hood, Whittier, and other poets have challenged the respect of the Romney Leighs of the world. Yet one hesitates to make specialization ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins

... Belgian mystic, narrowly graze the truth in some of his chamber music, and then fall victim to the fascinations of the word; as if the word, spoken or sung, were other than a clog to the free wings of imaginative music! Illowski noted the struggles of these dreamers, noted Verdi swallowed by the maelstrom of the theatre; noted Richard Strauss and his hesitation at ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker

... his carcase lay upon the floor, and the two-gallon jar was empty. But, for the real man, who could answer to the name of Roger Acton, the sensitive and conscious soul—that was some where galloping away for fifteen hours in the Paradise of fools: the Paradise? no—the Maelstrom; tossed about giddily and painfully in one whirl of ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... the Committee on Reconstruction as "the maelstrom committee, which swallows up every thing that is good and gives out ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes

... rapids, and cataracts, quite without any physical reason for existence, were thought to roar and roll just beyond the horizon. It is only within a few decades that the geographies have abandoned the pleasing fiction of the maelstrom, and a few centuries ago the sudden downpour of the waters at the "end of the world" was a thoroughly accepted tenet of physical geography. Yet men, adventurous and inquisitive, kept ever pushing forward into the ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot

... were pressing towards the bank, and many were suffocated and crushed. The Comte and Comtesse de Vandieres owed their lives to the carriage. The horses that had trampled and crushed so many dying men were crushed and trampled to death in their turn by the human maelstrom which eddied from the bank. Sheer physical strength saved the major and the grenadier. They killed others in self-defence. That wild sea of human faces and living bodies, surging to and fro as by one impulse, left the bank ...
— Farewell • Honore de Balzac

... good, one must take it up as a profession. It is quite the most engrossing one in the world. Have you ever been with a good person who is taking a holiday from being good? It is like falling into the Maelstrom. They carry you off your feet. Their enjoyment terrifies the imagination. They are like a Sunday school let loose in the Moulin Rouge, or Mr. Toole when he has made a pun! Sometimes I wish that I could be good too, in order to have such a ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens

... little maelstrom of foam and ripples, the line runs out to its full length, and the canoe careers about, accurately steered by the aft man, in the erratic course of the wounded creature. As it tires, the heavy haft of the harpoon secured by the half hitches round the thin end being a considerable ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield

... was an interesting experience and a novel one. For months he had been feeling that he lived in the whirl of a maelstrom of schemes and jobberies, the inevitable result of the policy of a Government which had promised to recoup those it had involuntarily wronged during a national convulsion. Upon every side there had sprung up claimants—many an honest one, and hordes of those not honest. There were ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... be kindled again hereafter. Being and not being came round in endless succession for all save him, into whom all being was resolved, and out of whom it emerged again, as from the vortex of some aeonian Maelstrom. ...
— A Little Book of Stoicism • St George Stock

... a maelstrom, for Wally and Jim were unpacking. Brownie, putting in her head, described it as "a perfick shambles," and affected great horror at the havoc occasioned by having boys in the house—beaming all the while in a manner calculated to destroy the effect of any lecture. Norah, ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce

... Barnato South African mining furor in England, the Secretan copper corner, and the tremendous bonanza delirium in California; but none of these, save the first, is comparable with the magnitude of the copper maelstrom of 1899. The tulip craze could have been thrust in and withdrawn again without diverting one of its currents; the Barney Barnato affair was little more than an eddy on the surface of English finance in contrast. We were dealing in hundreds and five hundreds of millions; shares rose ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson

... and swum now for about a year in this World-Maelstrom of London; with much pain, which however has given me many thoughts, more than a counterbalance for that. Hitherto there is no outlook, but confusion, darkness, innumerable things against which a man must "set his face like a flint." Madness rules the world, as it has generally ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson

... and by the reprobation of several public critics; some correspondents favoured me with their anonymous scurrility, and some bigots relieved me of their acquaintance. On the other hand, there were people who, in the midst of a maelstrom of passion, ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott

... article in this month's Bookman, called "How Old Is Sherlock Holmes?" has revived our old ambition to own a complete set of all the Sherlock Holmes tales, and we are going to set about scouring the town for them). Every time we pass through the Atlantic Avenue maelstrom, which is twelve times a week, we see, as plain as print, the ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley

... part of the Ypres fighting, and downwards from the coast the surge of battle was also drawn into that maelstrom. The British naval guns had destroyed the attraction of the dunes, and the Germans turned towards the inland marshes along the Yser. On the 23rd they crossed it and advanced to Ramscapelle, but were driven back by the Belgians, while fourteen unsuccessful attacks were ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard

... Nov 4, '88. DEAR WILL,—I received your letter yesterday evening, just as I was starting out of town to attend a wedding, and so my mind was privately busy, all the evening, in the midst of the maelstrom of chat and chaff and laughter, with the sort of reflections which create themselves, examine themselves, and continue themselves, unaffected by surroundings —unaffected, that is understood, by the surroundings, but not uninfluenced ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... attention of France upon him. In the next number, while the "Murders" were still the talk of the hour, he made an excursion into the world of pseudo-science the result of which was his thrilling "Descent into the Maelstrom;" but later in the same month he returned to his experiments in analysis—publishing in The Saturday Evening Post an advance review of Charles Dickens' story "Barnaby Rudge," which was just beginning to come out in serial form. In the review he predicted, correctly, the ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard

... place, I must explain how I came to be without money in mine, so soon after arriving in Paris, where so much of the article is necessary. My woes all arise from vanity. That is the rock, that is the quicksand, that is the maelstrom. I presume you don't know anybody else who is afflicted with that complaint? If you do, I'll but teach you how to tell my story, and that will cure him; or, at least, it ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various

... combined forces of their Allied enemies. Half of Europe was in arms. The tragedies of the seas were appalling. International complications were grave and unending. More than one statesman of prophetic foresight had predicted that a continuance of the war must of necessity draw into the maelstrom the government of the United States. In such an event the country would need soldiers and many of them, and the sooner they could be put into training to meet such ...
— The Flag • Homer Greene

... a startling dash at 'Meg with the muckle mouth.'[10] Sharply did I strike the caitiff; whereat he rolled round disdainful, making a whirl in the water of prodigious circumference; it was not exactly Charybdis, or the Maelstrom, but rather more like the wave occasioned by the sudden turning of a man-of-war's boat. Being hooked, and having by this time set his nose peremptorily down the stream, he flashed and whizzed away like a rocket. My situation partook of the nature of a surprise. Being on a rocky shore, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various

... looked through the shaded eyepiece, and saw a whirling mass, in the centre of which the blazing globe seemed to be laid bare to its core. It was a peep into a maelstrom of fire, taking place where nobody had ever been ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy

... of all, has broadened me, or benumbed me. I don't know. All I seem to see clearly—to clearly understand—is the dreadful brevity of life, the awful chances against living, the miracle of love in such a maelstrom, the insanity of one who dare not confess it, live for it, love to the uttermost with heart, soul, ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers

... after month, would bring these children out into the light of self-control and concentration. The hurried, crowding, exciting methods of the public schools are disastrous to fully half of the unformed minds sent into the intellectual maelstrom which America provides under the ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.

... the youth of Budge Street after his triumph over Billy Goodge, and the boy obeyed meekly. Paul believed in himself; the boy didn't. Almost from the beginning he usurped an ascendancy over the little household. For all their having lived in the great maelstrom of London, he found his superficial experience of life larger than that of mother and daughter. They had never seen machinery at work, did not know the difference between an elm and a beech and had never read ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke

... outlook on life. They were a disappointment to me in some ways. They seemed like mechanisms. They moved as if drawn by some great magnet whose centre was Dawson City. They appeared to drift on and in toward that human maelstrom going irresolutely to their ruin. They did not seem to me strong men—on the contrary, they seemed weak men—or men strong with one insane purpose. They set their faces toward the golden north, and went on and on through every obstacle ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland

... the squadrons, now of one army, now of the other, marched up to assault it. But though they marched up, Manasseh saw none of them return. Austrians, French, and Italians, all seemed to be swallowed up alike in that maelstrom of ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai

... His brain a maelstrom, Lance stared at the crumpled figure. It was the only way! He heard the motors above come roaring down again; desperately he carried the blood-choking Hay to his own plane; propped him limply at the controls. Bullets spat through a frenzy of noise. Weakly Hay ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various

... everywhere, came the obnoxious word. Red heaved himself over the fence and piled into the fans. Then followed the roar of many voices, the tramping of many feet, the pressing forward of line after line of shirt-sleeved men and boys. That bleacher stand suddenly assumed the maelstrom appearance of a surging mob round an agitated center. In a moment all the players rushed down the field, ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey

... "William Wilson," a story of double personality (one good and one evil genius in the same person), to which Stevenson was indebted in his Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Next are the tales of pseudo-science and adventure, such as "Hans Pfaall" and the "Descent into the Maelstrom," which represent a type of popular fiction developed by Jules Verne, H. G. Wells and many others, all of whom were more or less influenced by Poe. A third group may be called the ingenious-mystery stories. One of the most typical of these is "The Gold Bug," a tale of cipher-writing ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long

... agitation left her, and she became cold and still. She was in a maelstrom of feeling a minute before, though she could not have said what the feeling meant; now she was dominated by a haunting sense of injury, roused by resentment, not against him, but against everything and everybody, himself included. All the work of the last few months seemed suddenly ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... holiest pearl! Lorenzo, shallow fool—he does not guess The mischief was all done, and that it was The duke he saw departing—oh, brain—brain! How shall I hold this river of my wrath! It must not burst—no, rather it shall sweep A noiseless maelstrom, whirling to its center All thoughts and plans to further my revenge And rid me of this most ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various

... was a transient favorite of the fickle goddess. When gambling lost its power to drown the voice of conscience, there was the race, the play and the wine cup! To each of them appealing in turn, he went whirling madly around the outer circles of the great maelstrom in which so many brilliant youths were swallowed ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss

... to be seething about Gora, and as they were rapidly presented by Miss Halsey and passed on they produced the effect, in the inner circles, of a maelstrom. On the outer edge the women frankly stood on chairs to get a better look at the new lion, or pushed forward with frenzied determination to the fixed center of the whirlpool, whose gracious smile ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton

... unexplained, unless one could make a further draft on the imagination and suggest that the stars had been thrown into a vast eddy, or system of eddies, whose vortices appear as dark holes. Only a maelstrom-like motion could keep such a funnel open, for without regard to the impulse derived from the projectile, the proper motions of the stars themselves would tend to fill it. Perhaps some other cause of the whirling motion may be found. As we shall see when we come to the spiral nebul, ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss

... far, if you put it in miles; only from New York; if you mean by impressions, a thousand leagues. It is at least that from that maelstrom to this quiet green place. How should one have nerves in a place like this? To sit here in peace and turn slowly into a lettuce—that would be the natural thing; but life is not natural, if ...
— Fernley House • Laura E. Richards

... supposed to be the site of constant whirlpools, such as Charybdis, the Maelstrom, and others. It means ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth

... not be their centre. Was the sun Their sovran lord then, as Pythagoras held? Was this great earth, so 'stablished, so secure, A planet also? Did it also move Around the sun? If this were true, my friends, No revolution in this world's affairs, Not that blind maelstrom where imperial Rome Went down into the dark, could so engulf All that we thought we knew. We who believed In our own majesty, we who walked with gods As younger sons on this proud central stage, Round which ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes

... at one time thought seriously of entering the army with the hope of seeing active service in the Philippines. But Aguinaldo's surrender put a quietus on this project, and he entered a broker's office in Wall Street Here, in the maelstrom of frenzied finance, his pent up energies found an outlet. He went into the stock gambling game with the feverish energy of a born gambler. Months of excitement followed, luck being usually with him. He was successful. He doubled and tripled his capital, after which he ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow

... sound of the shrill, weird cry, the animal stood at bay. Again came the well-known strident halloo. A maelstrom of memories was awakened by the call. Instinctively obeying the old summons she started toward the train, when from over the hill behind her she ...
— Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley • Belle K. Maniates

... had come from some almost forgotten lumber lands that his father had failed to heave into the Confederate maelstrom. Perhaps it had come a little soon for the very best upbuilding of the character of David Kildare, but he had stood shoulder to shoulder with them all in the fight for the establishment of the new order of things and his generosity ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess

... We could purchase a doughnut and a cup of coffee almost anywhere, or we could eat a sandwich in the park, but the matter of a bed, the business of sleeping in a maelstrom like New York was something more than serious—it was dangerous. Frank, naturally of a more prodigal nature, was all for going to the Broadway Hotel. "It's only for one night," said he. He always was ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... too entered this maelstrom chasm, and, though the helm was hove hard up, and the after-sails shivered, yet, before the 'Scourge's' bows, going at the rate she was, could turn the sharp angle of that water-gate, her port bilge grated against a coral ledge, and grooved and broomed the planks and copper away like so much ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise

... juncture, Rudyard Kipling unconsciously came into the very centre of the suffragists' maelstrom of attack when he sent Bok his famous poem: "The Female of the Species." The suffragists at once took the argument in the poem as personal to themselves, and now Kipling got the full benefit of their vitriolic abuse. Bok sent a handful of these criticisms to Kipling, who was very gleeful about ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)

... afternoone appeared ouer our heads a rainebow, like a semicircle, with both ends vpwarde. [Sidenote: Malestrand a strange whirle poole.] Note that there is between the said Rost Islands and Lofoot, a whirle poole called Malestrand, [Footnote: Maelstrom.] which from halfe ebbe vntill halfe flood, maketh such a terrible noise, that it shaketh the ringes in the doores of the inhabitants houses of the sayd Islands tenne miles off. Also if there commeth any Whale within the current of the same, they make a pitifull ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, • Richard Hakluyt

... of the Maelstrom, on the 26th of April, the ship, putting for the cape, by reason of bad weather and south-west winds, perceived signals of distress made by a schooner to the leeward. This schooner, deprived of its mizzen-mast, was running towards the whirlpool, under bare poles. Captain Louis Cornbutte, seeing ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne

... canyon lightened. A river-wide froth, like a curtain, moved down, spreading mushroom-wise before it, a rolling, heaving maelstrom. Bostil ran to escape the great wave that surged into the amphitheater, up and up the rocky trail. When he turned again he seemed to look down into hell. Murky depths, streaked by pale gleams, and black, sinister, changing forms yawned beneath ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey

... away, and that was how the wind howled so, and how the bedclothes would not keep the children warm, and how Santa Claus got in. The wind corkscrewed down into these holes, and the reckless children with their drums and dolls, their guns and toy dishes, danced around in the maelstrom and sang: ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various

... propellers and rudder showing to the troubled troopers who sadly watched the demise of the famous old ship. A quarter of an hour longer she floated, sinking lower and lower, then, with an easy motion, she slid away from sight. For a few minutes a maelstrom of white, surging water foamed and spurted, then, sadly and slowly, the host of small craft which had rushed to the rescue made again for their stations. Destroyers manoeuvred in vain search of the submarine, while battleships and cruisers in a haze of smoke disappeared ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie

... The Hun is aware of this; with malice aforethought he lands shells into the cathedral every Sunday in an effort to smash the altar. So far he has failed. One finds in this a symbol—that in the heart of the maelstrom of horror, which this war has created, there is a quiet place where the lamp of gentleness and honour is kept burning. The Hun will have to do a lot more shelling before he puts the lamp of kindness out. From the polluted trenches of Vimy the poppies spring up, blazoning abroad ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson

... more or less true of the American writer up to a date roughly coinciding with that of the Chicago World's Fair in 1892. During the thirty years more or less which have elapsed since that date, there has been an ever widening seething maelstrom of cross currents thrusting into more and more powerful conflict from year to year the contributory elements brought to a new potential American culture by the dynamic creative energies, physical and ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... lived only through memory and were misted with intervening years, while it came upon me during early nights, again and again, that this was Now, and that into the hour-glass neck of Now was headed a maelstrom of untold riches of the Future—minutes and hours and sapphire days ahead—-a Now which was wholly unconcerned with leagues and liquor, with strikes and salaries. So I turned over with the peace which passes all telling—the ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe

... figures, of fierce dark faces, of maddened cries of hate, of uplifted hands, of dull-clashing weapons. I seemed to see it all through a red fog whence the blood dripped, and I lost consciousness of everything save my unswerving duty to strike hard until I fell. At last out from the maelstrom of that wild melee but a single warrior seemed to face me; and some instinct of the fight caused me to draw back a pace and wipe the obscuring blood away, that I might see him better. It came to me that this was ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish

... miserable occupants may have festered in body and rotted in soul—harming only themselves and the physical atmosphere meanwhile, and victims of the horrible aggregation of poverty in great cities; while within the other a maelstrom of pleasant dissipation has been whirling, to which the victims came in their own carriages with full liveries, the waves as they circled sending up jets of cooling spray and redolent of perfumes from the flowers of sunny lands—but continually ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford

... There's nobody there to order yet, but he's just getting his hand in, and ten seconds later, when the first member of the company arrives, he is saluted with nineteen stentorian commands in one blast. Half a minute later the engine-house is clogged with fire-fighters, and the air is a maelstrom of orders, counter orders, suggestions, objections, and hoarse yells. Then a roar of wheels sounds outside, and you drop the bell-rope handle and go out to see the ...
— Homeburg Memories • George Helgesen Fitch

... the sea in the Pentland Firth, or off the north-western coast of Norway, making a deep round hole, and the waters, rushing into the vortex and gurgling in the holes in the centre of the stones, produced the great whirlpool which is known as the Maelstrom. As for the salt it soon melted; but such was the immense quantity ground by the giantesses that it permeated all the waters of the sea, which have ever since been ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber

... impressed with the "copious and excellent vocabulary" of his ambitious reporter, who was, even then, he says, "determined upon a high and useful career." In a letter to Colonel Irish, in 1913, Lane wrote, "That simple little card of yours was a good thing for me. It took me for a minute out of the maelstrom of pressing business and carried me back, about thirty years, to the time when I was a boy working for you—an unbaked, ambitious chap, who did not know where he was going, but was ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane

... of Norway there is an extensive vortex, or eddy, which lies between the islands of Moskoe and Moskenas, and is called Moskoestrom, or Maelstrom; it occupies some leagues in circumference, and is said to be very dangerous and often destructive to vessels navigating these seas. It is not easy to understand the existence of a constant descending stream without supposing it must pass through a subterranean cavity to ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin

... called. "Wait for me, I'm going down!" But his voice was lost in the maelstrom of sound just as his body was lost in the maelstrom of motion. Besides, an automatic elevator cannot hear. It is merely a mechanism that goes up and down, just like the other mechanisms that go in and out, or around and around, and you get caught up in them the way a squirrel ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch

... forlore! the souls who feel that blast Which sweeps around that black forbidding coast! Fierce whirling storms and hurricanes here leap, With blasting lightnings maltalent and sweep The furious waves that lash around that shore, As the fierce whirl of some dread maelstrom's power! Above the cavern's arch! see! Ninip[10] stands! He points within the cave with beckoning hands! Ur-Hea cries: "My lord! the tablets[11] say, That we should not attempt that furious way! Those waters of black death will smite us down! Within that ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous

... mariner on the voyage of life, (in the steerage,) who has been buffeted by reason, tempest-tossed by imagination, becalmed by fancy, wrecked by stupidity, (other people's,) and is now whirling helplessly in the Maelstrom of conundrums? (If that doesn't touch your heart, then has language failed to accomplish the end for which ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 15, July 9, 1870 • Various

... relieve my necessities; I have walked the town through and through in the effort to procure work, but my prayers have been unanswered, and my efforts have proven unavailing. At times the thought of the maelstrom of woe into which I am plunged, has well nigh driven me to madness. My brain has seemed on fire, and the shrieks of the maniac would have been heard resounding through the walls of this room, but ...
— The Trials of the Soldier's Wife - A Tale of the Second American Revolution • Alex St. Clair Abrams

... earthquake in the South, And maelstrom in the sea; Say, Jesus Christ of Nazareth, Hast thou ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson

... good waltzer, but not a graceful one. He steered his way well, and went with a strong swing that covered a great deal of ground; but there was a want of finish. Lady Mabel looked as if she were being carried away by a maelstrom. And now people began to move towards the supper-rooms, of which there were two, luxuriously arranged with numerous round tables in the way that was still a novelty when "Lothair" was written. This gave more room for ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon

... felt that the result would never be worth the cost and that he, too, would come in for a measurable share of their censure. But deep and lasting as his sympathy was for those who had been brought into this maelstrom of war, yet, pessimism found no lodgment within him, rather was his great soul illuminated with the thought that with splendid heroism they had died in order that others might live the better. Twice ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House

... exceedingly struck, since I last wrote to you, by some extracts from Edgar Poe's writings; I mean a book called "The Readable Library," composed of selections from his works, prose and verse. The famous ones are, I find, The Maelstrom and The Raven; without denying their high merits, I prefer that fine poem on The Bells, quite as fine as Schiller's, and those remarkable bits of stories on circumstantial evidence. I am lower, dear friend, than ever, and what is worse, in supporting myself on my hand I have strained ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields

... practice of cruelty; and it was said there were times when he became humanized amidst his debauchery, laughed at the terror which his furious declamation excited, and might be approached with safety like the Maelstrom at the turn of tide. His profusion was indulged to an extent hazardous to his popularity, for the populace are jealous of a lavish expenditure, as raising their favourites too much above their own degree; and the charge of peculation finds ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox

... mind a maelstrom of conflict. She knew nothing about money; it had never occurred to her that her father had none, and the cryptic allusion to the "bar'l" was even more puzzling. She knew that her father was a man to be feared, but he had always been the same; she ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles

... went upstairs without a word. Unused to any worry, always able to pay others for the execution of necessary details, this young man was a victim of the system which had engulfed his unfortunate sire in the maelstrom of ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball

... illegal, and subversive of national sovereignty; but it is the duty of nations to resort to force, and to declare themselves against things which dishonor them and disgrace their independence." * But an invitation to enter the European maelstrom and battle for neutral rights made no impression upon the ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson

... circumrotation[obs3], circumvolution, circumgyration[obs3]; volutation[obs3], circination|, turbination[obs3], pirouette, convolution. verticity|, whir, whirl, eddy, vortex, whirlpool, gurge[obs3]; countercurrent; Maelstrom, Charybdis; Ixion. [rotating air] cyclone; tornado, whirlwind; dust devil. [rotation of an automobile] spin-out. axis, axis of rotation, swivel, pivot, pivot point; axle, spindle, pin, hinge, pole, arbor, bobbin, mandrel; axle shaft; gymbal; hub, hub of ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget

... strength and blessing. Beware of the deceitful streams of temporary gratification, whose eddying current drifts towards license, shame, disease and death. Remember, how quickly moral power declines, how rapidly the edge of the fatal maelstrom is reached, how near the vortex, how terrible the penalty, how fearful ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis

... about the iron fence, and surging past the big equestrian statue, could be heard the roar and din of the great city—that maelstrom which now seemed ready to engulf him. No sound of merry laughter reached him, only rumbling of countless wheels, the slow thud of never-ending, crowded stages lumbering over the cobbles, the cries of the hucksters selling hot corn, and the ceaseless scrapings ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith

... one believe that the passion of the American people for learning and for antiquity is a slight and accidental thing? Does any one believe that the taste for imitation old furniture is a pose? It creates an eddy in the Maelstrom of Commerce. It is a power like Niagara, and represents the sincere appreciation of half educated people for second rate things. There is here nothing to be ashamed of. In fact there is everything to be proud of in this progress of the ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman

... and Tully slain; See Paris red with riot and noble blood, A king beheaded and a monster throned,— King Drone, flat fool that weather-cocked all winds, Gulped gall and vinegar and smacked it wine, Wig-wagged his way from gilded Oeil de Boeuf Through mob and maelstrom to the guillotine. Chateaus up-blazing torch the doom of France, While human wolves howl ruin round their walls. Contention hisses from a million mouths, And from ten thousand muttering craters smokes The smell of sulphur. Gaul becomes a ghoul; While Parlez-Tous ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon

... McGolwey and his sneering assumption that Milt belonged in the filth with him. And he hated himself for not being enough of a genius to combine Bill McGolwey and Claire Boltwood. But not once, in his maelstrom of worry on that street corner, did he expect Claire to like Bill. Through all his youthful agonizing, he had enough common sense to know that though Claire might conquer a mountain pass, she could never be equal to the social demands of Schoenstrom ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis

... business. Falling on the ball, sprinting and limbering up, and running through a few signals, we spent the few minutes before the Yale team came through the corner of the field. The scenes of enthusiasm that had marked our arrival were repeated, the Yale stand being the center this time of the maelstrom of cheers. I shall not attempt to describe our own feelings as we got the first glimpse of our opponents in the coming fray. Who can describe the sensations of the contestants in the first moment of a ...
— Football Days - Memories of the Game and of the Men behind the Ball • William H. Edwards

... without question, Kit turned her head to see what on earth he was warning her against, and before she could stop herself the rowboat was caught in an eddy that formed a miniature maelstrom at this point, from a large sunken tree that fell nearly to midstream from the shore. The frail rowboat overturned like a crumpled leaf. Kit was bareheaded and it seemed to Stanley as long as he lived ...
— Kit of Greenacre Farm • Izola Forrester

... in discussing with them the grave aspects of political affairs. Without rest or opportunity to survey the field that lay before him, or any preparations save such as the resources of his own strong character might afford him, he was plunged instantly into the great political maelstrom in which he was to remain for four long years, and whose wild vortex might well have bewildered an eye less sure, a will less resolute, and a brain less cool than his. As Emerson put it, "The new pilot was hurried to ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne

... enthusiasm, as to lift and fill them with something like the breath of universal nature. His special gift is his magnetic and unconquerable personality, his towering egoism united with such a fund of human sympathy. His power is centripetal, so to speak,—he draws everything into himself like a maelstrom; the centrifugal power of the great dramatic artists, the power to get out of and away from himself, he has not. It was not for Whitman to write the dramas and tragedies of democracy, as Shakespeare wrote those of feudalism, or as Tennyson sang in delectable verse the ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs

... machinery; and the higher interests of being, and the great firmament of immortality, be eclipsed by these flashing wheels. We are in danger of being drawn away from the sanctities of the inner life and the still work of the soul, by this maelstrom of excitement and power. No religious man can help asking, and asking anxiously, whether the spirit of devotion is as deep and fresh, whether spiritual communion with God is as direct and constant, in this whirl and roar, ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin

... then attributed the accident to Pepper himself, whose mouth, being open at the instant I fired, acted upon the arrow much after the fashion of a whirlpool, and drew in the fatal shaft. I was about to explain how a comparatively small maelstrom could suck in the largest ship, when the curtain fell of its own accord, amid the shouts of ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... the Giaour—a penitential despair arising from a cause undisclosed. The Giaour, though wounded and fettered, and laid in a dungeon, would not have felt as Conrad is supposed to feel in that situation. The following bold and terrific verses, descriptive of the maelstrom agitations of remorse, could not have been appropriately applied to the despair of grief, the predominant source ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt

... storm would whirl me off "As thistle-down. I'll shelter here—but you— "You love no storms!" "Where thou art," I said, "Is all the calm I know—wert thou enthron'd "On the pivot of the winds—or in the maelstrom, "Thou holdest in thy hand my palm of peace; "And, like the eagle, I would break the belts "Of shouting tempests to return to thee, "Were I above the storm on broad wings. "Yet no she-eagle thou! a small, white, lily girl "I clasp and lift and carry from ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford

... mean to say we have to go up that maelstrom?" he said, pointing to the river, and ...
— The Norsemen in the West • R.M. Ballantyne

... women, human flower of all the maelstrom of urban toil, in their detachment seemed only to bring up a visualized picture of Mary. What would he not like to do for her! He wished that he could pick up the Waldorf and set it on the other side of the street as a proof of the overmastering desire that possessed him whenever ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer

... the University of Copenhagen, "at which," his teachers bore witness, "no one need wonder who knows the man," he became at twenty-two pastor of a parish up in the Lofoden Islands, where the fabled maelstrom churns. Eleven years he preached to the poor fisherfolk on Sunday, and on week-days helped his parishioners rebuild the old church. When it was finished and the bishop came to consecrate it, he chided Egede because the altar was too fine; it must have ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis

... in the outer eddies of that human maelstrom, found himself beside Juana Briones. "The jury's out," she told him. "Jury's out!" the word swept onward. Then there came a long and silent wait. Once again the messenger appeared. "Still out," he bellowed, "having trouble." "What's the matter with them?" a score of voices shouted. ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman

... sum was realized for some charity,—I forget what,—and the affair was voted highly successful. The next day, the 28th, we were creeping towards our harbor through one of those dense fogs which are more dangerous than the old rocks of the sirens, or Scylla and Charybdis, or the much-lied-about maelstrom. ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... the last beam closed down a roar arose from the workers clustered about the lip of the vertical pump bore. A wall of water came surging down from the upstream end of the cavern and smashed into the bore hole wall in a muddy, seething maelstrom. The strata-borne water had found the hole and were pouring down into the cavern and catch basin. The water began rising in the walls of the hole, sealed into a shining shaft of fused rock and silicon by ...
— The Thirst Quenchers • Rick Raphael

... lecture-room was futile enough, but the faculty-room was worse. American society feared total wreck in the maelstrom of political and corporate administration, but it could not look for help to college dons. Adams knew, in that capacity, both Congressmen and professors, and he preferred Congressmen. The same failure marked the society of a college. Several score of the best- educated, most agreeable, and personally ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams

... if they had been washed in the ditch and dried in the chimney; he, who had always dwelt among the sand-hills, now saw a great city for the first time. How lofty the houses seemed, and what a number of people there were in the streets! some pushing this way, some that—a perfect maelstrom of citizens and peasants, monks and soldiers—the jingling of bells on the trappings of asses and mules, the chiming of church bells, calling, shouting, hammering and knocking—all going on at once. Every trade was located in the basement of the houses or in the side thoroughfares; and the ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen

... of Orientals and a miniature army of fishermen had appeared as if by magic, and were quartered in the lower part of the city awaiting shipment. Boyd and Big George worked unceasingly in the midst of a maelstrom of confusion, the centre of which was the dock. There, one throbbing April evening, The Bedford Castle berthed, ready to receive her cargo, and the two men made their way toward their hotel, weary, but glowing with the grateful sense of an ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach

... ocean of exception large enough to float any number of battleships for which pride and ambition may be willing to pay! Honor? No, a finical and foolish reservation that at any moment may become a maelstrom of suspicion and rage and hatred and destruction and death! Honor? No, a mountainous barrier to peace that must be leveled before there can be progress! Honor? No, the incarnation of selfishness, the cloak of shrewd politics, the mask of false ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association

... rumours and false charges such a change would give rise to. The mother and child are now costing me the greater part of my income. My grandfather finds fault with me about it, for he regards it as so much money thrown away. Now, Leopold, do you think I could draw a man I really loved into such a maelstrom as this?" ...
— Major Frank • A. L. G. Bosboom-Toussaint

... instant of numbing silence fell. A swish! A cat on a small bear's back. A scene impossible! A hairy tornado, rolling, twisting, flopping, yelling, screeching, roaring, and howling, tore, bit, scratched, clawed, and walloped all over the place. An epileptic nebula; a maelstrom that revolved in every way known to man at the same instant; a prodigy of tooth and claw. If that fight were magnified a hundred times, a glimpse of it would kill; as it was, myself and the clothing store boy clung weakly to ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips

... two, and rushed down in twin streams, bubbling, tumbling, hissing, plunging into the lake, which whirled furiously around the spit of land on which the castle stood, clear of ice for a distance of a hundred feet from the shore, a foaming maelstrom in which no boat that was ever built could have endured an instant, but must have been twisted and flung back like the fantastically shaped ice ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert

... just told you—" George plunged again into the maelstrom, and a pretty girl appeared from the firelit room behind to stir him to his highest flights of eloquence. A smell of savoury cooking came also, and out in the street night shut down dark and chill and sinister, as it does in all the best novels. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 29, 1919 • Various

... cylinders, drive them from where they crawled on ceiling, wall and sill into whistling flight. Amid a whirlwind of wings she fought them toward the open window; whizzing, flitting, circling they sped in widening spirals to escape her blows, where she stood half blinded in the vortex of the ghostly maelstrom. ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers

... delightful sense of their own wisdom and virtue; and of the 'progress' of things in general:—in smooth sea and fair weather,—and with no need either of helm touch, or oar toil: as when once one is well within the edge of Maelstrom. ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... recurring incident. Maddened, senseless, unreasoning in their panic, the mass behind came on, a sea of tossing horns, a maelstrom of swirling, blinding dust and heaving bodies into the mire; the struggling, enmeshed bodies of the vanguard forming a living floor, over which each newcomer ...
— Square Deal Sanderson • Charles Alden Seltzer

... It's probably very prosaic out there, the same as it is anywhere, most of the time. It was a peculiar combination of circumstances that plunged us into such a maelstrom of adventure. And yet—I don't see why you should hope for such a placid courtship for them. It took just that ordeal to bring out your really fine points. They were there all the time, dear, but I might never have ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx

... military. If the expansion, expulsion and rehabilitation had produced greater degrees of stability and security for individuals and social groups they might have been tolerated and assimilated by the diverse populations caught up in the maelstrom of drastic expansion. But rapid, coercive social transformation produces neither stability nor security. Its normal consequence is chaos, conflict and further change. In the course of these internal conflicts the Roman Republic was gradually phased out. ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing

... so implacably from a fixed sky that one was naturally inclined to slip away out of the reach of its attentions, and even the slumbering water, whose repose was perpetually being invaded by the insects that swarmed above its surface, while it dreamed, no doubt, of some imaginary maelstrom, intensified the uneasiness which the sight of that floating cork had wrought in me, by appearing to draw it at full speed across the silent reaches of a mirrored firmament; now almost vertical, it seemed on the point of plunging down out of sight, and I had begun to ask myself whether, setting aside ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust

... a ball might be carried on the summit of a waterspout, had been taken into the circling movement of a column of air and had traversed space at the rate of ninety miles an hour, turning round and round as if seized by some aerial maelstrom. ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne

... of age when, "for conscience' sake" and "in the sweete peace of God," he left England and threw in his lot with the young colony in Massachusetts Bay. At twenty-three he was {274} Governor of the Colony and found himself plunged into a maelstrom of politics, Indian wars, and ecclesiastical quarrels which would have tried even a veteran like John Winthrop. It was here in Massachusetts that the lines of his religious thought first come clearly into view, if any of Vane's ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones

... were, and having no other special objective point in view, it was only natural for the two fugitives to drift into Sheridan. This was at that time the human cesspool of the plains country, a seething, boiling maelstrom of all that was rough, evil, and brazen along the entire frontier. Customarily quiet enough during the hours of daylight, the town became a mad saturnalia with the approach of darkness, its ceaseless ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish

... uncanny about Fairbridge's influence upon people after they had lived there even a few years. The influence held good, too, in the cases of men who daily went to business or professions in New York. Even Wall Street was no sinecure. Back they would come at night, and the terrible, narrow maelstrom of pettiness sucked them in. All outside interest was as naught. International affairs seemed insignificant when once one was ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... am restless. I think, and think, and I cannot cease from thinking. I have been in the thick of life so long that I am oppressed by the peace and quiet, and I cannot forbear from dwelling upon that mad maelstrom of death and destruction so soon to burst forth. In my ears are the cries of the stricken; and I can see, as I have seen in the past,* all the marring and mangling of the sweet, beautiful flesh, and the souls torn with violence from ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London

... burst, with an almost tropic vigor, into riotous growth. Flamboyant youth, calculating middle age, doddering senility, all these were there, all treading on one another's heels, to reap and be reaped. To-day a scene of marvelous activity, a maelstrom of bustling commissariat and fretting supply-trains, cut by never-ending counter-currents of hoboes to and from the front, to-morrow it would simmer down into the desuetude of a ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various

... her multitudinous store— The garnered fruit of measureless desire— Sank in the maelstrom of abysmal fire, To be of man beheld on earth no more? Her loyal children, cheery to the core. Quailed not, nor blenched, while she, above the ire Of elemental ragings, dared aspire On victory's wings resplendently to soar. What matters all the losses of the years, ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various

... long intervals developed here and there in the mass—eddies that not impossibly might widen at any time with perilous quickness to the maelstrom of a stampede. So as he rode Bunt sang to these great brutes, literally to put them to sleep—sang an old grandmother's song, with all the quaint modulations of sixty, seventy, a hundred ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris

... I had taken passage with the Olandese Volante. There was nothing in the world for it, however, but to go to bed, and there, with the accession of a slight sea-sickness, my views of the situation underwent a total change. I had gone down into the Maelstrom with the Ancient Mariner—I was a Manuscript Found in ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells

... could lift the veil of the awful past. On this eventful night Fritz Braun hid, within his heart, an awful resolve, born of the fear of the disguised felon, floating uneasily in the maelstrom of a great city. "If she should betray me, and women are women, after all," he mused in his cowardly ferocity. "If she pulls this off for me, I'll"—he ceased, with an inward shudder, for he dared not give the awful thought its ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage

... shaken by some invisible inner force, swayed to and fro. A shrill yell rang out and at the signal scores of hoarse voices were raised in shouts of mad defiance—threats and calls for action. As the whirling waters of a maelstrom are drawn to the central point, the mob was massed before the ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright

... in the purple twilight, Blanche waited upon the walk, And beckoned her white hand to me— A lily swayed on its stalk. Soon my jealous pride was foundered In the maelstrom of talk. ...
— Stories in Verse • Henry Abbey

... strewn with ribbons, laces, and scraps of tinsel, instead of the usual notebooks; third-year girls, reviving slowly from the strain of the Tripos, consented languidly to have their hats re-trimmed by second-year admirers, and so, despite themselves, were drawn into the maelstrom. One enterprising Fresher offered items of her wardrobe on hire, by the hour, day, or week, and reaped thereby quite a goodly sum towards her summer holiday. A blue-silk parasol, in particular, was in universal request, and appeared ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... the richer a man found himself in ancestral acres, the more hopelessly was he manacled by taxes. "Reconstructionists" most thoroughly inoculated with "Loyal" rabies, held in lofty disdain the claims of widows and orphans, and the right of minors was as dead as that of secession. In the general maelstrom, Colonel Gordon's large estate went to pieces; but after a time, Judge Dent took lessons from his new political masters in the science of wrecking, and by degrees, as fragments and shreds stranded, he collected and secreted ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... their nests in the muzzles of old and disused cannon; even that does not suggest a more anomalous association of ideas than the spectacle of a vine-clad cottage shaded by fig trees, basking peacefully in the sun, so close to what was at one time a veritable maelstrom of human passions. So far as the new Coloma is concerned, Marshall's discovery might never have been made. Nowhere else will you find a spot where gold and what it stands for would seem to mean so little, Coloma! It is passing strange that a name so sweet ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley

... at the street-corners; till the ten-flounced dress has but three flounces, and it is felony to drink champagne; wait till these changes show themselves, the signs of deeper wants, the preludes of exhaustion and bankruptcy; then let us talk of the Maelstrom;—but till then, let us not be cowards with our purses, while brave men are emptying their hearts upon the earth for us; let us not whine over our imaginary ruin, while the reversed current of circling events is carrying ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... began with volume eighteen, being the addition of the ten volumes of Atkinson's Casket, and the seven volumes of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine. This first volume, 1841, contained Poe's "Descent into a Maelstrom" and his "Murders in the ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth

... shrieking with its high hues was filled with Turcos in panic flight crowding one another in their terror, while over them billowed the yellow poison pall of death; but in the midst of the maelstrom the roaring Canadian guns stood immovable and unyielding, served by gunners who rose superior alike to the physical terrors of battle and the moral ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino

... Looking down from this height over the city it became at last possible to conceive this overwhelming multitude of thirty-three millions, the reality of the responsibility he would take upon himself, the vastness of the human Maelstrom over which his slender ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells

... let him go. He certainly stands a better chance in his life's journey for the little good we have been able to put into him. When we try a little to resist the evil current and to pull here and there one out, we learn how dreadful is the downward gravitation, the sweep and whirl of the maelstrom. Let us hope all these have a Father, who charges himself with them somewhere further on in their eternal pilgrimage when our ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields

... that maelstrom of frenzied murder-lust took courage of the highest order. But neither Bohannan nor the Frenchman had even paled. Not one of their men showed ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England

... had only one foreign policy, and that was to hold inviolate the Monroe doctrine. European or Asiatic complications scarcely even interested her. Those times have passed, Dicky. Cuba and the Philippines were the start of other things. We are being drawn into the maelstrom. In another ten years we shall be there, whether we ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... light, there was no place where a man could redeem his manhood better than on the Woman's Rights Platform. Gentlemen in distant seats were perhaps trembling to think that they had actually got that far into this dangerous place. They might think themselves well off—no, badly off—if the maelstrom did not draw them nearer and nearer and nearer in, as it did him. He began, like them, hesitating and smiling on the back seats; they saw what he had got to now, and he hoped they, too, might get into such ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... the numerous children of which seemed to have been born to bloom for a few years in the rugged garden of this world, and then be transplanted to the better land. Only the youngest son survived. He entered the army and went to India—that deadly maelstrom which has swallowed up so much of British youth and blood and beauty! When the old couple became bankrupt and died, the old nurse found herself alone and ...
— The Garret and the Garden • R.M. Ballantyne

... and bitter trial confronted him. He had never been a politician. Now he was caught in a maelstrom of ungenerous and malignant politics. All his influence and effort had been addressed to promote the calming of the passions of the war, and a reunion in fact as well as in form. The President, professing an intention of carrying out the policy of his predecessor, began a method ...
— Ulysses S. Grant • Walter Allen

... reluctance. But we cannot forget that we are in some sort and by the force of circumstances the responsible spokesmen of the rights of humanity, and that we cannot remain silent while those rights seem in process of being swept utterly away in the maelstrom of this terrible war. We owe it to a due regard for our own rights as a nation, to our sense of duty as a representative of the rights of neutrals the world over, and to a just conception of the rights of mankind to take this stand now with ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson

... forged letter in the Times classed him with assassins, while an legal Commission was sent to try his whole movement. It is history that his triumphant vindication was followed by a greater fall. The happiness of Ireland was sucked into the maelstrom of his ruin. He refused to retire from leadership at Gladstone's bidding, and Ireland staggered into civil war. The end is known—Parnell died as he had lived. Of his moral fault there is no palliation, but it may ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox

... ideal, but the second became a maelstrom of doubt and trouble in which he whirled madly around trying to find some philosophy that would ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks

... floor; Gatton's voice shouting orders. Then, we had jumped into the cab and enjoining the man to drive like fury, were speeding off through the busy London streets. Leaving the quietude of one suburb for the maelstrom of central London, we presently emerged into an equally quiet backwater upon the ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer

... a borrowed needle and thread, was busied with some minor repairing of garments roughly used the day before. Other boarders and lodgers of the house had already eaten and gone, to resume their swirl in the maelstrom of the camp. ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels

... Europe with tumult and disorder, the far-northern realms of Norway and Sweden and the far-eastern one of Turkey alone escaping from being drawn into the maelstrom of conflict. Denmark, the Scandinavian kingdom nearest the region of conflict, did not escape, but was made the victim of wars with which it had no concern ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris

... through a little maelstrom of fine dust which a wind circle had picked up, and the sheriff led Bull into the jail. They crossed the tawdry little outer room with its warped floor creaking under the tread of Bull Hunter. Next they came face to face ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand

... he plunged into the maelstrom. The rushing water swept him back, again and again, but each time the struggle was renewed with increased determination; and each effort carried him a few yards nearer the goal. Just as it seemed the coveted ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller

... roaring noise given forth by the naphtha lamps, the monotonous chanting of the prisoners, the perpetual "All's well" of the sentries, and the intermingling notes of the bugle calls suffused the air with their distracting sounds and made me feel as if my head were in a maelstrom. The bugler was so amiable a person that he always made it a point of standing close to my tent when launching forth to the world his shrieking calls. Happily I became acclimatised to my distasteful surroundings, or ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen

... conventionalities of Anglo-Saxon propriety. The Short-story should not be void or without form, but its form may be whatever the author please. He has an absolute liberty of choice. It may be a personal narrative, like Poe's "Descent into the Maelstrom" or Hale's "My Double, and How he Undid me;" it may be impersonal, like Mr. F.B. Perkins's "Devil-Puzzlers" or Colonel De Forest's "Brigade Commander;" it may be a conundrum, like Mr. Stockton's insoluble query, "The Lady or the Tiger?" it may be "A Bundle of Letters," ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various

... Belgians, but with their hearts instead of their hands. The stupendous wave of sympathy was at its height. It rolled across the land and then across the sea. People were swept along by its mighty rush. Anne Thorpe was caught up in the maelstrom of human energy. ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon

... through the press, I must write. Even this was dreadful, as I must use my own name, for my articles would certainly be libelous. If I wrote at all, I must throw myself headlong into the great political maelstrom, and would of course be swallowed up like a fishing-boat in the great Norway horror which decorated our school geographies; for no woman had ever done such a thing, and I could never again hold up my head under the burden of shame and disgrace which ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm

... blessings in their train—promote, with other evils, a pernicious development, with calamitous reaction upon him, of the aggrandizing instinct of the white, who would lure and entrap him into every kind of disastrous negotiation—its outcome, in truth, a very maelstrom of artful intrigue and shameless rapacity, looking to the absorption of the Indian's land, and of the few worldly possessions he now has. Nay, many would foresee for the Indian, through the consummation of his enfranchisement, naught ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie

... had while dodging furious trams and enormous waggons piled with merchandise, in that maelstrom of traffic near the Marseilles docks, which must be passed before we could escape into the country. At last, coasting down a dangerously winding hill with a too suggestively named village at the bottom—L'Assassin—the Aigle turned ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson

... bank was doomed, for from the frame buildings west of it there was being swept a veritable maelstrom of sheet flame that leaped toward it in giant strides. Not ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum

... provocation, the Recording Angel's office was hard worked these days. One would be reading a letter, already wretched enough with heat and flies, and suddenly you would be fighting for breath and sight in a maelstrom of dirt, indescribably filthy dirt, whilst your papers flew up twenty feet and your rifle hit you cruelly over the head. As a Marian martyr observed to an enthusiast who thrust a blazing furze-bush into his face, 'Friend, have I not harm enough? What need of that?' One storm at ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson

... a dear Shaker brother once fell from grace and disappeared in the maelstrom of the carnal world; in a few years he came back as penitent as he was penniless, with strange accounts of how men had fleeced him of all he possessed save the clothes—none too desirable—on his back. Men were so scarce that the credulous sisters and charitable deacons ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy

... or ball. For, early in life, I was taught to believe That pleasures are pitfalls prepared to deceive By wily old Satan (who constantly tries To catch you by throwing his dust in your eyes, Thus, blinding his victim, securing his prize); That the dance is a maelstrom, where sinners are whirled Around a few times, and then suddenly hurled From daylight to darkness, from pleasure to woe, From terrestrial regions, to regions—below: But now was afforded a fine opportunity For taking some pleasure with perfect ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... opposition to Judge Latimer's renomination had developed, which was not traceable to any definite source. Although Danvers avowed a dislike for politics, in reality he had the inherent instinct for political life characteristic of the upper-class Englishman, and he threw himself into the maelstrom with all his forces well in hand. Office-seeking was disgusting to him, but the fight for his friend seemed worth ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman

... our soul's course o'er trackless lands, Swayed oft by adverse winds, or swept along In Fate's wild current with the fluttering throng Towards Sin's engulfing maelstrom, spirit hands Will brace our trembling wings, and through the night Point and upbear in our last ...
— A Woman's Love Letters • Sophie M. Almon-Hensley

... nothing. The drivers pressed close in on him, pinpointing him in the middle of the intersection. Shouts and jeers and horns; the roaring scream of fire engines; people running and shouting; Ventura at Laurel Canyon was a cacophonous maelstrom. ...
— The Glory of Ippling • Helen M. Urban

... maritime nation, could scarcely expect to escape the maelstrom of war induced by the task of suppressing the French Revolution and Napoleon, a task which occupied the legitimists of Europe for a quarter of a century, and involved every civilised nation of the Old World. President Washington had early laid the course of the ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks

... the masses of the people were so miserably poor that they were scarcely elevated above the beasts of the field, and where the finances had long been in almost irreparable disorder. The years of peace, however, were very few. War, a maelstrom which ingulfs uncounted millions, seems to have been the normal state of Germany. But the treasury of Charles was so constantly drained that he could never, even in his greatest straits, raise more than one hundred and sixty ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott

... disorderly suburbs and slums, without plan or direction—how men and women became factory workers and office workers without knowing why, most of them scantily educated, housed as the competing jerry-builders thought fit, and flung into the maelstrom of competitive labour. All this we knew in a certain sense, but it was Mr. Wells more than anyone else who made us aware of this national life by presenting it in the only possible effective way, the imaginative way. It may almost be said that he gave it to us as an impressionistic account ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James

... then the other. Shell after shell came roaring over; one dropped on the remaining walls of a chateau, and when the smoke had cleared there was absolutely nothing left. How in the world anything could live in such a maelstrom of explosive it ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins

... with me not to lose any opportunity of administering 'instant relief and speedy cure' to all complainers, stranger or friend, gentle or simple. Alas! it is with a bitter smile, a laugh of gall and bitterness, that I recall this period of unsuspecting delusion, and how I first became aware of the Maelstrom, the fatal whirlpool to which I was drawing, just when the current was beyond my strength to stem. The state of my mind is truly portrayed in the following effusion, for God knows! that from that time I was the victim of pain and terror, nor had I at any time taken the ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill

... where helm could be crashed and man overthrown, the mighty strength of Edward widened the breach more and more, till faster and faster poured in his bands, and the centre of Warwick's army seemed to reel and whirl round the broadening gap through its ranks, as the waves round some chasm in a maelstrom. ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... of France there were thousands of husbands who had lost their wives and children, thousands of families who had been divided hopelessly in the wild confusion of retreats from a brutal soldiery. They had disappeared into the maelstrom of fugitives—wives, daughters, sisters, mothers, and old grandmother, most of them without money and all of them dependent for their lives upon the hazard of luck. Every day in the French newspapers there were long ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs

... their eyes and only moved their lips in prayer as they saw that inevitably in a few minutes they must be sucked into the maelstrom. Now, however, they ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton

... over my shoulder, and the whistle was dashed from my grasp. Then came a riot of maelstrom fighting, with Smith and myself ever sinking lower amid a whirlpool, as it seemed, of blood-lustful eyes, yellow ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer

... had been discovered, and were prepared to die defending ourselves. Ned Land stopped his work for the moment, and the noise grew louder. It was a terrible word, twenty times repeated, that we heard. "The Maelstrom! The Maelstrom!" was what they were crying. Was it to this, then, that the Nautilus had been driven, by accident or design, with such headlong speed? We heard a roaring noise, and could feel ourselves whirled in spiral circles. The steel muscles of the submarine ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.

... of the Company.' This, of course, turned out as the saint had foretold, and after a long day's march they encountered the Jesuit and became Christians. *7* This account seems to have been lost, and a careful search has not disinterred it from the Maelstrom of Simancas, that prison-house of so many documents, without whose aid so much of Spanish ...
— A Vanished Arcadia, • R. B. Cunninghame Graham

... mates Tazewell, Randolph, Cabell, Thompson, and James Barbour, and hailed with rapture the progress of the French revolution; but, shocked by the barbarities which disgraced the later stages of that moral and political maelstrom, and indignant at the unprecedented conduct of the diplomatic agents of France in our own country, he determined to separate from his early friends, and to uphold with all his influence the administration of Washington and that of his successor. It is said that ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby



Words linked to "Maelstrom" :   current, stream, vortex, Charybdis



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