"Wrack" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... changed your tune, haven't you? Who trotted up and down California Street last fall, soliciting campaign contributions for the Republican nominee from the lumber and shipping interests? Wasn't it Alden P. Ricks? Who thought the country was going to wrack and ruin—" ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... jes' set there, side by side, seein' who 'd speak first, for twenty year, to my cer-ting knowledge; and you go by there when it was blowin' fresh, and the old curtings would be flappin' in and out, black and white, till finally the whole arrangement sunk out o' sight. I guess there 's more or less wrack there now, 'f you sh'd go ...
— Five Hundred Dollars - First published in the "Century Magazine" • Heman White Chaplin
... twinty years a section boss, he worked upon the track, And be it to his cred-i-it he niver had a wrack. For he kept every j'int right up to the p'int wid the tap of the tampin-bar-r-r; And while the byes was a-swimmin' up the ties, It's "Jerry, wud yez ile ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various
... still in time to say good-night to the guest he rather cavalierly treats." And he rose and went downstairs to meet his host. The great door was ajar. He went into the open air. The garden was utterly dark, for clouds obscured the stars, and the air was laden with the saline odour of the wrack below high-water mark. The tide was out. What he had expected was to see Mungo and his master, but behind the castle where they should have been there was no one, and the voices he heard had come from the side next the shore. He listened a ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... give o're, But as untir'd, and restless as before, Still through whole waiting Ages they outdo At once the Chimists pains and patience too. Who though he sees his bursting Limbecks crack, And at one blast, one fatal Minutes wrack, The forward Hopes of sweating years expire; With sad, yet painful hand new lights his Fire: Pale, lean, and wan, does Health, Wealth, all consume; Yet for the great Elixir still to come, Toyls and hopes on. No less their Plottings ...
— Anti-Achitophel (1682) - Three Verse Replies to Absalom and Achitophel by John Dryden • Elkanah Settle et al.
... find herself wondering if, after all, the barque of her life had been steered by a guiding Hand, which, although it had taken her over storm-tossed seas and stranded her on lone beaches, had brought her safely, if troubled by the wrack of the waters she had passed, ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... tasting of powder, smelling of smoke, now lit, now darkened, but vacant of human life, and now he was in a press of men, grey forms advancing and retreating, or standing firing, and now he was where fighting had been and there was left a wrack of the dead and dying. He reached the centre and gave his message, then turned toward the left again. A few yards and his horse was killed under him. He disengaged himself and presently caught at the bridle and stayed another. There were many riderless horses on the field of Sharpsburg, but he ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... ascertain his longitude—an operation which would have been much more difficult in the hazy weather that had prevailed some few hours previous, with the zenith every now and then overcast by the fleecy storm wrack and flying scud that came drifting across the sky as the wind veered; but the ship was making good running, and everything bade fair for her soon crossing the boisterous Bay of Biscay, on whose troubled waters she ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... furnace over field and mead, The rounding noon hangs hard and white; Into the gathering heats recede The hollows of the Chelsea height; But under all to one quiet tune, A spirit in cool depths withdrawn, With logs, and dust, and wrack bestrewn, ...
— Lyrics of Earth • Archibald Lampman
... mine had been sprung beneath the spot upon which had been dumped her emotions of the last two months, blowing some to atoms, bringing to light others that had lain buried. Out of the wrack, joy, shame, fear fell at her feet—and a sentence out of a letter was staring ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... sought to gain, and hold them, it remains now that I speak in general of the offences and defences, that may chance in each of the forenamed. We have formerly said that it is necessary for a Prince to have good foundations laid; otherwise it must needs be that he go to wrack. The Principal foundations that all States have, as well new, as old, or mixt, are good laws, and good armes; and because there cannot be good laws, where there are not good armes; and where there ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... ice or deep water? And when the wind blew from the east, strange land birds alighted on the yard-arms. Dead whales with the harpoons of strange hunters washed past the ship; and driftwood of a kind that did not grow in Asia tossed up on the tide wrack. It was the word brought back by these free-lances of the sea that induced Peter the Great to send Vitus Bering on a voyage of discovery to the west coast of America; and when the castaways of Bering's wreck returned with a new fur ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... water, London, the while, kept herself in her smudgy convent, her ear tuned only to the jolting music of her streets, the rough syncope of wheel and voice. Since then what countless winds have blown across the world, and cloud-wrack! And this older century is now but a clamor of the memory. What mystery it is! What were the happenings in that pin-prick of universe called London? Of all the millions of ant hills this side Orion, what about this one? London was so certain it was the center of circumambient ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... these for medicines. It is the mind, and not the event, that distinguisheth the courtesy from wrong. My adversary may offend the judge with his pride and impertinences, and I win my cause; but he meant it not to me as a courtesy. I 'scaped pirates by being ship-wracked; was the wrack a benefit therefore? No; the doing of courtesies aright is the mixing of the respects for his own sake and for mine. He that doeth them merely for his own sake is like one that feeds his cattle to sell them; he hath his horse well dressed ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... is; and what a quantity of sea-weed," said Ellen Herbert; and, indeed, it was not easy to move over the broken cliffs, since the accumulation of wrack made ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... tore; The English strove with desperate strength, paused, rallied, staggered, fled— The green hill-side is matted close with dying and with dead. Across the plain, and far away, passed on that hideous wrack, While cavalier and fantassin dash in upon their track. On Fontenoy, on Fontenoy, like eagles in the sun, With bloody plumes, the Irish stand—the field ...
— Thomas Davis, Selections from his Prose and Poetry • Thomas Davis
... have a detestable taste. However, Herbert, who had gone forward a little more to the left, soon came upon rocks covered with sea-weed, which, some hours later, would be hidden by the high tide. On these rocks, in the midst of slippery wrack, abounded bivalve shell-fish, not to be despised by starving people. Herbert called Pencroft, ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... that which they thinke no crime. As to your third reason, it scarselie merites an answere. For if the deuill their master were not bridled, as the scriptures teacheth vs, suppose there were no men nor women to be his instrumentes, he could finde waies inough without anie helpe of others to wrack al mankinde: wherevnto he employes his whole study, and goeth about like a roaring Lyon (as PETER saith) (M16) to that effect, but the limites of his power were set down before the foundations of the world were laid, which he hath not power in the least jote to transgresse. But beside all this, ...
— Daemonologie. • King James I
... board. When the news of that whiskey comes flyin' inland, it ain't a case of individyooals nor neighborhoods, but whole counties comes stampedin' to the rescoo. It's no use; the boat bogs right down in the sand; in less than an hour her smoke stack is onder water. All we ever gets from the wrack is the bell, the same now adornin' a Presbyter'an church an' summonin' folks to them services. I tells you, gents, the thoughts of that Willow Run, an' we not able to save so much as a quart of it, puts a crimp in that commoonity ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... of little ones, than he stops, turns round abrupt, an' sets down on his tail; an' then upliftin' his muzzle he busts into shrieks an' yells an' howls an' cries, a complete case of dog hysterics! That's what he is, a great yeller dog; his reason is now a wrack because we harasses ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... This, this the greatest, and to this one compard All that are past but trifles. Oh that grand maister Of mechall[90] lusts, that bulke of brothelree, That stillary of all infectious sinnes, Hath scapt the wrack, and with his fellowe guest And partner in corruption makes this waye, And with no tarde pace. Where shall I hyde mee! Whether shall I fly to Palestra back And with this sadd relation kill her quite That's scarce recovered! rather, you hy powers, Then to ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... deemed fit guide to lead my way, And as I deemed I did pursue her track; Wit lost his aim, and will was fancy's prey; The rebel won, the ruler went to wrack. But now sith fancy did with folly end, Wit, bought with loss — will, ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... realised itself. There was not a visible particle of Plattner to be seen; not a drop of blood nor a stitch of clothing to be found. Apparently he had been blown clean out of existence and left not a wrack behind. Not so much as would cover a sixpenny piece, to quote a proverbial expression! The evidence of his absolute disappearance as a consequence ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... nothing now but one thing: rescue! The barrels at the marksmen's shoulders peer So ghastly, that, giddy and amazed, Desire is mute, save one desire: To live. The whole great nation of the Mark might sink To wrack mid flare and thunderbolt; and he Stand by nor even ask: What comes to pass?— Oh, what a hero's heart ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... tossed fountains of foam against the rocks, and such grey and white waves swallowed up the sands! I ran and played with the children and the dog—and built a big sand castle ("Early English if not Delia Cruscan"!!), and by good-luck and much sharp hunting among the storm-wrack flung ashore among the foam, found four cork floats, and made the children four ships with paper sails, and had a glorious dose of oxygen and iodine. How strange are the properties of the invisible air! The air from an open window at Ecclesfield ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... kings.' But is this any reason you should not apply Your superfluous wealth to ends nobler, more high? You so rich, why should any good honest man lack? Our temples, why should they be tumbling to wrack? Wretch, of all this great heap have you nothing to spare For our dear native land? Or why should you dare To think that misfortune will never o'ertake you? Oh, then, what a butt would your enemies make you! Who will best meet reverses? The man who, you find, Has by luxuries pampered ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... hate to watch the flower set up its face. I loathe the trembling shimmer of the sea, Its heaving roods of intertangled weed And orange sea-wrack with its necklace fruit; The stale, insipid cadence of the dawn, The ringdove, tedious harper on five tones, The eternal havoc of the sodden leaves, Rotting the ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... such like means presenting themselves to men in those extremities, for we desired to save the men by every possible means. But all in vain, sith God had determined their ruin; yet all that day, and part of the next, we beat up and down as near unto the wrack as was possible for us, looking out if by good hap we might espy ...
— Sir Humphrey Gilbert's Voyage to Newfoundland • Edward Hayes
... strangeness and beauty of the world in its most remote and least-known quarters, had witnessed fights with savages, threaded unmapped straits, and had, to crown his youthful achievements, striven amidst the wrack and thunder of grim-visaged war. We may picture his welcome: the strong grasp of his father's hand, the crowding enthusiasm of his brother and sisters fondly glorying in their hero's prowess. The warnings ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... done. In the tempest's wrack the stars are dim and faith 's the only compass. Now or hereafter, what matters it? The sun will gild the meadows as of yesteryear. The moon will fee the world with silver coin. And all across the earth men will traffic ...
— Wappin' Wharf - A Frightful Comedy of Pirates • Charles S. Brooks
... say so. To my best remembrance, he lay crying out all one night for fear; and at times he would so tremble that he would make the very bed shake under him. But O! how the thoughts of death, of hell-fire, and of eternal judgment, did then wrack his conscience. Fear might be seen in his face, and in his tossings to and fro; it might also be heard in his words, and be understood by his heavy groans. He would often cry, I am undone, I am undone; my vile ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... coolly, "since you've worked yourself up so much over the matter, and as we're a-goin' along on our course agin, as I suggested to the skipper afore we raised the wrack"—here he went to the pantry and brought out a bottle, and held it out ...
— Mr. Trunnell • T. Jenkins Hains
... the Capital Offenders, in their Confessions. We professing law must speak reverently of kings and potentates. I perceive these honourable lords, and the rest of this great assembly, are come to hear what hath been scattered upon the wrack of report. We carry a just mind, to condemn no man, but upon ...
— State Trials, Political and Social - Volume 1 (of 2) • Various
... or wrack-wreath, whether by dark or day, I heave them whole to the conger or rip their plates away, First of the scattered legions, under a shrieking sky, Dipping between the rollers, ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... this were all, 'twere something; but they are the only known enemies to my generation. A fasting-day no sooner comes, but my lineage goes to wrack; poor cobs! they smoak for it, they are made martyrs O' the gridiron, they melt in passion: and your maids to know this, and yet would have me turn Hannibal, and eat my own flesh and blood. My princely coz, [pulls out a red herring] fear nothing; I have not the heart to ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... drive a gimlet? See, I am a salaried wit; and is there aught in nature more ridiculous? A poor, dull, heart-broken man, who must needs be merry, or he will be whipped; who must rejoice, lest he starve; who must jest you, jibe you, quip you, crank you, wrack you, riddle you, from hour to hour, from day to day, from year to year, lest he dwindle, perish, starve, pine,and die! Why, when there's naught else to laugh at, I laugh at myself till I ache ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... Some in huge masses, some that you may bring In the small compass of a lady's ring; Figured by hand divine—there's not a gem Wrought by man's art to be compared to them; Soft, brilliant, tender, through the wave they glow, And make the moonbeam brighter where they flow. Involved in sea-wrack, here you find a race Which science, doubting, knows not where to place; On shell or stone is dropp'd the embryo-seed, And quickly vegetates a vital breed. While thus with pleasing wonder you inspect Treasures the vulgar in their ...
— The Borough • George Crabbe
... he had gone a hundred yards, he lost his first zest in the adventure. The darkness had thickened; and the vagrant wind-gusts had tightened into a steady gale; a gale which carried before it a blinding wrack ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... disgrace expecting every hour Those flatterers that before (with many cheerful look) Had grac'd his goodly sight, him utterly forsook, And muffled them in clouds, like mourners veiled in black, Which of their utmost hope attend the ruinous wrack: That those delicious nymphs, fair Team and Rodon clear (Two brooks of him belov'd, and two that held him dear; He, having none but them, they having none but he Which to their mutual joy might either's object be) ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... Brandon was filled with a great exultation. As he stood, for a moment, at the door of his house in the Precincts before crossing the Green to the Cathedral, he looked up at the sky obscured with flying wrack of cloud, felt the rain drive across his face, heard the elms in the neighbouring garden creaking and groaning, saw the lights of the town far beneath the low wall that bounded the Precincts sway and blink in the storm, his ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... hand out of the swirling drift of cares, anxieties, ambitions, hopes; and I see now that I could not have rescued myself; that I should have gone on battling with the current, catching at the river wrack, in the hopes of saving something from the stream. Now I am face to face with God; He saves me from myself, He strips my ragged vesture from me and I stand naked as He made me, unashamed, nestling close ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... golden bowels of America. Navarre that cloakes them underneath his wings, Shall feele the house of Lorayne is his foe: Your highnes need not feare mine armies force, Tis for your safetie and your enemies wrack. ...
— Massacre at Paris • Christopher Marlowe
... my love, The moon above Shines bright and ever brighter; And all the black And sullen wrack Grows ...
— Welsh Lyrics of the Nineteenth Century • Edmund O. Jones
... long-hoped-for event was at hand. It seemed impossible that Mary could be there—that she was about to stand before him. His mind was filled with the things he had arranged to say to her, but they were now in confused mass, circling and circling like the wrack of a boat ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... save in the sullen green hollows of the waves, was dead and lead-coloured as far as the eye could reach—as leaden, indeed, as the heavy grey sky overhead, where some fleecy floating clouds of lighter wrack, rapidly drifting across the darker background that lined the horizon all round, made the latter of a deeper tone by contrast, besides acting as the avant courier of a fresh squall—the wind just then tearing and shrieking through the rigging ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... time had been part of Sherwood Forest, and these were ancient trees that had been spared when others fell. Centuries old some of them, with vast trunks and huge gnarled, twisted branches which seemed to have suffered from terrible convulsions of nature, been put on the wrack, as it were, and come forth mutilated ...
— The Rider in Khaki - A Novel • Nat Gould
... Proteus led his flocks to climb The flatten'd heights, When fish were in the elm-tops caught, Where once the stock-dove wont to bide, And does were floating, all distraught, Adown the tide. Old Tiber, hurl'd in tumult back From mingling with the Etruscan main, Has threaten'd Numa's court with wrack And Vesta's fane. Roused by his Ilia's plaintive woes, He vows revenge for guiltless blood, And, spite of Jove, his banks o'erflows, Uxorious flood. Yes, Fame shall tell of civic steel That better Persian lives had spilt, To youths, whose minish'd numbers feel ...
— Odes and Carmen Saeculare of Horace • Horace
... gun still angry-hot, And my lids tingled with the tears held back; This scorn methought was crueller than shot; The manly death-grip in the battle-wrack, Yard-arm to yard-arm, were more friendly far Than such ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... with the sea-wrack, crabs, sea-nettles, jelly-fish, and the thousand and one other small creatures that inhabit the ocean, dates from ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloudcapt Towers, the gorgeous Palaces, The solemn Temples, the great Globe itself, And all which it inherit, shall dissolve; And like this unsubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a wrack behind'; ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... above water that at two leagues' distant it was not visible from the look-out, was discovered in latitude 15 degrees 50 minutes, and 148 degrees 10 minutes longitude. The constant recurrence of breakers, trunks of trees in large quantities, fruits and sea wrack, and the smoothness of the sea, all indicated the neighbourhood of extensive land to the south-east. It was New Holland. Bougainville determined to leave these dangerous latitudes, where he was likely to meet with nothing but barren lands, and a sea strewn with ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... rallied, To save themselves from wrack, And from the towns they sallied, And drove the Romans back. The land was quite mounTAINous, Yet they were put to flight; And Titus Labienus ...
— Hildegarde's Neighbors • Laura E. Richards
... concealed by the "wrack" that covered the stones; and the Indians had not yet discovered us. They were evidently in doubt as to whether we had gone on, and this was their vanguard making the ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... herself up to the sensuous pleasure of the perfectly hung car, and the rapid movement through the summer air. Wythburn and Thirlmere were soon passed; leaving them just time to notice the wrack and ruin which Manchester has made of the once lovely shore of Thirlmere, where hideous stretches of brown mud, and the ruins of long submerged walls and dwellings, reappear with every dry summer to fling reproach in ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... said Miss Mattie, "but what with the money I had to spend for this and that, and not being able to get Mr. Joyce to come in for a day's work when I wanted him, it's gone on, until there is a good deal of wrack to it." ...
— Red Saunders • Henry Wallace Phillips
... and will pay toll to that province. The capitalists of Nova Scotia treat it like a hired house, they won't keep it in repair; they neither paint it to preserve the boards, nor stop a leak to keep the frame from rottin'; but let it go to wrack sooner than drive a nail or put in a pane of glass. 'It will sarve our turn ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... impression as in the Original. That is too long and tiresome; but (as in Richardson) its very length serves to impress it on the mind:—My Abstract is, I doubt not, more readable: but, on that account partly, leaving but a wrack behind. What I have done indeed is little else than one of the old Review Articles, which gave a sketch of the work, and let the author fill in ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... they are! "Whip, whip the fool!" We wrack Our weary brains to make a jest and then, In payment, we are whipped if they so feel Inclined! They treat us more like ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... flour, an' rubbin' his hands and laughin', jes' the way Farmer does. He was a good miller, father said, an' made the mill pay well. But his eldest son, that kem after him, warn't no great shakes, an' he let the mill go to wrack and ruin, an' jes' stayed on the farm. An' then he died, an' Cap'n Hartley came (that's the farmer's father, ye know), an' he was kind o' crazy, and didn't care about the mill either, ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... in ev'ry page, And sits archbishop still, to vex the age. Had he foreseen—and who knows but he did?— This fatal wrack, which deep in time lay hid, 'Tis but just to believe, that little hand Which clouded him, but now benights our land, Had never—like Elias—driv'n him hence, A sad retirer for a slight offence. For were he now, like the returning year, Restor'd, to view these desolations here, ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... red and the clouds were black, O the sea is hungry ever! And the sky was heavy with flying wrack, When forth they fared,—and they came not back; O the sea ...
— Bees in Amber - A Little Book Of Thoughtful Verse • John Oxenham
... rain ceased, the wind abated its rage and the thunder pealed faint with distance, while ever and anon the gloom gave place to a vague light, where, beyond the flying cloud-wrack, a faint ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... reproducing itself in the shape of events happening visibly before our eyes, is a rarer phenomenon. And it seems to be occurring whenever a string of Laraghmenians come plodding up their winding mountain-path under the burden of heavy creels filled with earth, or oftener with slippery brown sea-wrack and leathery weed. For it is in this way that whatever scanty foothold their starveling crops may find, has been fashioned and maintained in the stony little fields. Year by year, as the blustery ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... WRACK. The English name for the fucus; the sea-weed used for the manufacture of kelp, and in some places artificially grown ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... to face the foreign foe, First to strike the battle blow; Last to turn from triumph back, Last to leave the battle's wrack; Clan of Cas shall victors be When they ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... down upon us early, and so dark that we could not see as far as the length of the ship, there being no moon, while the light of the stars was completely obscured by the dense canopy of storm-wrack that overshadowed us, the only objects visible outside the bulwarks being the faintly phosphorescent heads of the breaking seas as they swept down menacingly upon us from to windward; the air was raw and chill, although it was only the first week in September; the decks ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... a cheery "Good-night"—Bellew went out to walk among the roses. And, as he walked, he watched the flying wrack of clouds above his head, and listened to the wind that moaned in fitful gusts. Wherefore, having learned in his many travels to read, and interpret such natural signs and omens, he shook his head, and muttered to himself—even as ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol
... the features, indeed, of the progeny itself would but too plainly indicate, that he conceived, and wrote some part of, his poem of 'Don Juan;'—and never did pages more faithfully and, in many respects, lamentably, reflect every variety of feeling, and whim, and passion that, like the wrack of autumn, swept across the author's mind in writing them. Nothing less, indeed, than that singular combination of attributes, which existed and were in full activity in his mind at this moment, could ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... the ruby-colour'd portal open'd, Which to his speech did honey passage yield, 452 Like a red morn, that ever yet betoken'd Wrack to the seaman, tempest to the field, Sorrow to shepherds, woe unto the birds, Gusts and foul flaws to ...
— Venus and Adonis • William Shakespeare
... palisade the ground swam like a loch, and from the hill-side came the rumour of a thousand swollen streams. That, with the heavy drip of laden branches, made sound enough, but after the thunder and the downpour it seemed silence itself. Presently when I looked up I saw that the black wrack was clearing from the sky, and through a gap there shone a ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... retreated up narrow passages with my good broadsword flaming, and laid scores of men at my feet. I was sealed up in dungeons. I was snatched out of the deep by the hair of my head. I slew men in hecatombs; and then, when the morning came and I awoke, there was not a shred of intellectual wrack left behind on which my mind could take hold. I had dreamed it all with the cerebellum. It was all organic. Why didn't I dream a novel by Turgenef, or Bjornsen? It takes brains to write "Fathers and Sons" or the "Bankrupt," and it takes brains ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... Niblung war-ranks reel Behind the steadfast Gunnar: but lo, have ye seen the corn, While yet men grind the sickle, by the wind streak overborne When the sudden rain sweeps downward, and summer groweth black, And the smitten wood-side roareth 'neath the driving thunder-wrack? So before the wise-heart Hogni shrank the champions of the East As his great voice shook the timbers in the hall of Atli's feast, There he smote and beheld not the smitten, and by nought were his edges stopped; He smote and the ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... commotion; there is wind and rain; and out of it comes seed harvest. The waters of the sea are poured in thunder wrack upon the hills and run in rivers back into the sea. The winds make weather, and weather profits man. When will man's turmoil cease, when will he find calm? I do not know. I only know that toil and struggle ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... to the realms which he coasted! for there Was shedding of blood and rending of hair, Rape of maiden and slaughter of priest, Gathering of ravens and wolves to the feast; When he hoisted his standard black, Before him was battle, behind him wrack, And he burned the churches, that heathen Dane, To light his band to their ...
— Sir Henry Morgan, Buccaneer - A Romance of the Spanish Main • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... off the Scotch coasts, sea-wrack (Fucus vesiculosus) forms the chief support of horses and cattle in the winter months. F. serratus is similarly employed ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... captain peered out through the dense wrack and haze. A great dark cliff loomed out upon the left, jagged, inhospitable, ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... higher rose the norther; the latter being a cold dry wind is, consequently, a heavy wind. And when the sky was comparatively clear and blue, the display of cirri was noticeable. In some places they formed filmy crosses and thready lozenges; in others the wrack fell into the shape of the letter Z; and from the western horizon the curl-clouds shot up thin rays, with a common centre hid behind the mountains of Sinai, affecting all the airs ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... and they saw that the woman was fair, and that about her neck was a chaplet of gems that shone in the moon, and they had a longing both for the jewel and the woman: but before they laid hand on her they asked her of whence and whither, and she said: From ruin and wrack to the Well at the World's End, and therewith turned on them with a naked sword in her hand; so that they shrank ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... can double back All seeming forms, and from cold icicles Build up high glittering palaces where dwells Summer perfection, moulding all this wrack To spirit symmetry, and doth not lack The power to hear amidst the funeral bells The eternal heart's wind-melody which swells In whirlwind flashes all along its track! So hath the sun made all the winter mine With gardens springing round me fresh and fair; On hidden leaves ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... foolishly believed to be something more than an aggregation of atoms. The body dissolves into its constituent elements and serves in its turn to build up other organisms: but as a human body it all turns to dust nor 'leaves a wrack behind'. Thus Darwinism was made the basis first for a materialistic, and then for a monistic, view of the world, and hence came to be rigorously opposed to every form of Theism. But since, at that time, Darwinism was the only theory of evolution recognized by the world of ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... rocks as big as a house jumping 'bout a thousand feet high and busting into ten million pieces, cattle turned inside out and a-coming head on with their tails hanging out between their teeth!—and in the midst of all that wrack and destruction sot that cussed Morgan on his gate-post, a-wondering why I didn't stay and hold possession! Laws bless me, I just took one glimpse, General, and lit out'n the county in three ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... in the night, but the wind had dropped with the dawning, and now the rising sun tinted the fringe of the storm-wrack as it dwindled into the west and glinted on the endless crests of the long, green waves. To north and south and west lay a skyline which was unbroken save by the spout of foam when two of the great Atlantic seas dashed each other into spray. To the east was a rocky island, jutting ...
— The Great Shadow and Other Napoleonic Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... veil he could not describe, even in his own thoughts, hung between him and the sand over which he walked, between him and the sea which sent spray to wet his torn clothing, between him and that wild wrack of long-ago storms. He could put out his hand and touch sand, drift, spray; yet they were a setting where something lay hidden behind that setting—something watched, calculatingly, with intelligence, and a set of emotions and values he did not, ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... a little River, which being encompassed by the Rocks [63]was sheltered from the Wind, so that we had opportunity to land our selves, (though almost drowned) in all four persons, besides the Negro: when we were got upon the Rock, we could perceive the miserable Wrack to our great terrour, I had in my {{9 }} pocket a little Tinder-box, and Steel, and Flint to strike fire at any time upon occasion, which served now to good Purpose, for its being so close, preserved the Tinder dry, with this, and the help of some old ...
— The Isle Of Pines (1668) - and, An Essay in Bibliography by W. C. Ford • Henry Neville
... roadside; then the open post-road with a cypress to the right; afterwards, the rich green fields, and on a bit of rising ground an ancient farmhouse with its brown dependencies; lastly, the blue hills above Fossato, and far away a wrack of tumbling clouds. All this enclosed by the heavy archway of the Porta Romana, where sunlight and shadow chequer the mellow tones of a dim fresco, indistinct ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... seasonable night of March, with a pale moon, lying on her back as though the wind had tilted her, and a flying wrack of the most diaphanous and lawny texture. The wind made talking difficult, and flecked the blood into the face. It seemed to have swept the streets unusually bare of passengers, besides; for Mr. Utterson thought he had never seen that part of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... whatsoever. I've been trying to get her to come home for the last fortnight, but she just won't leave off going around with the sailors. The whole beach is ashamed of her. It's general talk down below. What can I do? The little old coral house is going to wrack and ruin and the baby ain't been properly took care of since she left. What am I going to do, madam? What am I going to ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... and ordered an absolute rest, after dwelling at some length on the vicious pace set by modern business and the lack of consideration and knowledge shown by men of affairs for their bodies. There was a limit to the wrack and strain which the human organism could stand. He must of course have suspected the presence of disturbing and disintegrating factors, but he confined himself to telling me that only an exceptional constitution ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... Jerrold's place is here. He's got a duty and a responsibility. Your dear father didn't leave him the estate for him to let it go to wrack and ruin. It's most cruel and ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair
... ran down over the boulders, and plunged off a rock into the clear sea, his white figure being traceable against the olive brown sea-wrack waving far below, as he swam for some distance below the surface, and then rose, shook the water from his eyes, and struck out for the lugger lying becalmed in ...
— A Terrible Coward • George Manville Fenn
... has vanished and left no wrack behind, rose once in this spot where we now stand, on the very threshold of the solitudes; but its necropoles, more venerated even than those of Memphis, and its thrice-holy temples, are a little farther on, in the marvellously conserving sand, which has buried them under ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... one and two; the moon (as I have said) was down; a strongish wind, carrying a heavy wrack of cloud, had set in suddenly from the west; and we began our movement in as black a night as ever a fugitive or a murderer wanted. The whiteness of the path guided us into the sleeping town of Broughton, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... crash like a very thunderbolt. The bear burst like an overcharged cannon! Benjy and the berg collided, and at that moment everything seemed to the former to vanish away in smoke, leaving not even a wrack behind! ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... Baron, as he calls himself, from East Prussia; and the Prince is so little of a man, sir, that he holds the candle. Nor is that the worst of it, for this foreigner and his paramour are suffered to transact the State affairs, while the Prince takes the salary and leaves all things to go to wrack. There will follow upon this some manifest judgment which, though I am old, I may ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... two of them meet,—as is often the case,—vast quantities of material substances, both vegetable and animal, are drifted together; where they are held, to a certain extent, stationary; or circling around in great ocean eddies. The wrack of sea-weed,—waifs from the distant shores,—birds that have fallen lifeless into the ocean, or drop their excrement to float on its surface,—fish that have died of disease, violence, or naturally,—for the finny tribes are not exempt from the natural laws of decay and ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... crawling over the mound, and whimpering peeped into the boathouse, she even fled to his shoulder with both hands for a moment, and was there, light as a feather, till the creature had passed on. And his soul was full of peace, and a great tranquillity overcame it. He heard nothing of the wrack, knew ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... were not attached to you I should be the most ungrateful wretch going. Here you have stayed away from home all these weeks, and worked like a servant making me all those lovely lemon-squashes and things, and letting your own affairs go to wrack and ruin, and you never seemed to remember that you had any affairs, or that there was such a thing as getting tired,—never seemed to remember anything except to take care of me. You are an angel—there is nobody like you. I don't believe any one else in ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge
... great Italian people, like the great English people, the great German people, and the people of every country where the privileged classes still exist, are rising like a mighty wave to sweep all this sea-wrack high and ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... is past. We hear again, Marie, The simple thirds, the waltz refrain, Marie; We only see some drifting wrack, An empty bunk, a battered smack, Alas! Alas!! ...
— Rhymes of the East and Re-collected Verses • John Kendall (AKA Dum-Dum)
... health shall suffocate my breath, To flye from them that holds my God in hate, My Mistres, Countrey, me, and my sworne fayth, Were to pull of the load from Typhons back, And crush my selfe, with shame and seruille wrack. ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, v. 7 - England's Naval Exploits Against Spain • Richard Hakluyt
... huddled together, whispered to one another,"It can blow no harder," and presently the gale would give them the lie with a piercing shriek, and drive their breath back into their throats. A fierce squall seemed to burst asunder the thick mass of sooty vapours; and above the wrack of torn clouds glimpses could be caught of the high moon rushing backwards with frightful speed over the sky, right into the wind's eye. Many hung their heads, muttering that it "turned their inwards out" to look at it. Soon the clouds closed up and the world again became a raging, blind ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... breast, And, with still panting rock, there took his rest. So lovely-fair was Hero, Venus' nun, As Nature wept, thinking she was undone, Because she took more from her than she left, And of such wondrous beauty her bereft: Therefore, in sign her treasure suffer'd wrack, Since Hero's time hath half the world been black. Amorous Leander, beautiful and young, (Whose tragedy divine Musaeus sung,) Dwelt at Abydos; since him dwelt there none For whom succeeding times make greater moan. His dangling tresses, that were never shorn, Had they been cut, and ...
— Hero and Leander and Other Poems • Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman
... gathered o'er us, and vivid lightnings played around the rocks near the camp: a storm came up and seemed to part in two, one half going north and the other south; but just before daybreak we were awakened by a crash of thunder that seemed to split the hills; and we heard the wrack as though the earth and sky would mingle; but only a few drops of rain fell, too little to leave any water, even on the surface of the flat rocks close to the camp. This is certainly an extraordinary climate. I do not believe a week ever passes without a shower of rain, but none falls to ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... fallen, and I walked along in no very happy frame of mind, the more so, as the rising wind and flying wrack of clouds above (through which a watery moon had peeped at fitful intervals) seemed to presage a wild night. It needed but this to make my misery the more complete, for, as far as I could tell, if I slept at all (and I ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... Medea, when the heroine has slain the children she has borne to Jason and in her fury refuses to let him gather up their dead bodies, when Jason in utter inconsolable despair, casts himself upon the earth, out of all this wrack and torture the chorus raises the audience into a contemplation of the ordered eternity by which these things ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... blown away the rain That all day long had soaked the level plain. Against the horizon's fiery wrack, The sheds loomed black. And higher, in their tumultuous concourse met, The streaming clouds, shot-riddled banners, wet With the flickering storm, Drifted and smouldered, warm With flashes sent From the lower firmament. And they ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... (Fucus vesiculosus), Kelpware, or Our Lady's Wrack, is found on most of our sea coasts in heavy brown masses of coarse-looking Sea Weed, which cover, and shelter many small algae. Kelp is an impure carbonate of soda containing sulphate, and chloride of ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... about him nor above him,—but a heaping only, monstrous and measureless, of skulls and fragments of skulls and dust of bone,—with a shimmer of shed teeth strown through the drift of it, like the shimmer of scrags of shell in the wrack of a tide. ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... character to be appreciable only by the eye, escaping altogether the ear: thus it is with 'draft' and 'draught'; 'plain' and 'plane'; 'coign' and 'coin'; 'flower' and 'flour'; 'check' and 'cheque'; 'straight' and 'strait'; 'ton' and 'tun'; 'road' and 'rode'; 'throw' and 'throe'; 'wrack' and 'rack'; 'gait' and 'gate'; 'hoard' and 'horde'{117}; 'knoll' and 'noll'; 'chord' and 'cord'; 'drachm' and 'dram'; 'sergeant' and 'serjeant'; 'mask' ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... was made by nearly all the observers. At Jamkandi, in the Western Ghauts, where Lieutenant (now Colonel) Herschel was posted, unremitting bad weather threatened to baffle his eager expectations; but during the lapse of the critical five and a half minutes the clouds broke, and across the driving wrack a "long, finger-like projection" jutted out over the margin of the dark lunar globe. In another moment the spectroscope was pointed towards it; three bright lines—red, orange, and blue—flashed out, and the problem was solved.[514] The ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... na, and I looked for Jamie back, But hard blew the winds, and his ship was a wrack, His ship was a wrack—why didna Jamie die, Or why am I spared to cry ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... fairy-foam of lace, the ivorine loveliness of glossy shoulders and jewelled throats, the glimmering of satin-slippered feet,—than to watch the raging of the flood without, or the flying of the wrack ... ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... dreadful thought Haunted Savitri's anxious mind, Which would have fain its stress forgot; It came as chainless as the wind, Oft and again: thus on the spot Marked with his heart-blood oft comes back The murdered man, to see the clot! Death's final blow,—the fatal wrack Of every hope, whence will it fall? For fall, by Narad's words, it must; Persistent rising to appall This thought its ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... twinkling shoals beset, And clasps the quick inextricable net. You chase the warrior Shark, and cumberous Whale, 80 And guard the Mermaid in her briny vale; Feed the live petals of her insect-flowers, Her shell-wrack gardens, and her sea-fan bowers; With ores and gems adorn her coral cell, And drop a pearl in every ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... Alexandria. But the wind falling contrary, he was forced the next morning to put into Falmouth Haven, in Cornwall, where such and so terrible a tempest took us, as few men have seen the like, and was indeed so vehement that all our ships were like to have gone to wrack. But it pleased God to preserve us from that extremity and to afflict us only for that present with these two particulars: the mast of our Admiral, which was the Pelican, was cut overboard for the safeguard of the ship, and the Marigold was ...
— Sir Francis Drake's Famous Voyage Round the World • Francis Pretty
... nearer leafless shrubs swaying in the chill wind, pavement glistening in the flickering light of street lamps. A dismal morning to be setting off to the sea! Portent of head winds and foul weather that we may meet in Channel before the last of Glasgow's grime and smoke-wrack is blown from ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... help it, Sir John; but a craft that is foreordained to be a wrack, will be a wrack, in spite of reefing and bracing. Look ahead, you Dick ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... danger of giving him cause to wish she had been better instructed, than may possibly suffice for her Salvation: Which, whatever happens, none can pronounce, may not be secur'd from the allowances due to so great Ignorance, or at least by any timely Repentance: Whilst Honour, if not intirely Ship-wrack'd, it is scarce reasonable to hope, should suffer no Diminution on such an occasion; the which, that Women the most vertuously dispos'd, may never be within distance of, will, in an Age like this, be best provided for by their being betimes ...
— Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian life • Lady Damaris Masham |
