"Oozy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... double burden, like trees in Java, bearing at once blossom, fruit, and falling fruit, as I have heard you or some other traveller tell, with his face literally as blue as the bluest firmament. Some wretched calico that he had mopped his poor oozy front with, had rendered up its native dye, and the devil a bit would he consent to wash it, but swore it was characteristic, for he was going to the sale of indigo; and set up a laugh which I did not think the lungs ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... they were slowly and not quite smoothly dropping through the lugubrious upper part of the structure, where it was darkened by a rough weatherboarding, or lower down, where the unobstructed light showed the grim tearful face of the cliff, bedrabbled with oozy springs, and the audacious slightness of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... till it touch the shining goblet's rim, Care-drowning Massic; let rich ointments flow From amplest conchs! No measure we shall know! What! shall we wreaths of oozy parsley trim, ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... in streams majestic flows, Or Naiads in their oozy beds repose While Phoebus reigns above the starry train While bright Aurora purples o'er the main, So long, great Sir, the muse thy praise shall sing, So long thy praise shal' make Parnassus ring: Then grant, Maecenas, ...
— Religious and Moral Poems • Phillis Wheatley
... of, but the seam still shining for many a long rood behind me.... To take shelter from the sunbeams under one of the thousand-footed bridges, and look down its interminable colonnades, crusted with green and oozy growths, studded with minute barnacles, and belted with rings of dark muscles, while overhead streams and thunders that other river whose every wave is a human soul flowing to eternity as the river below flows to the ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... going to break in? And at low water, too! Fifteen feet at least of oozy, slimy wall would stand up between the boat and the foot of the doorway; twenty feet to the nearest row of windows. Chippy could not form any idea of their tactics, but he meant to discover ...
— The Wolf Patrol - A Tale of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts • John Finnemore
... salts is then? You've seen it work? Experienced it, maybe? Hah! You'll understand me. I'm a grain of the Epsom Salt that went through Beersheba, time the Turks had all the booze in sight and we were thirsty. Muddy booze it was too—oozy booze—not fit for washing hogs! Ever heard of Anzacs? Well, I'm one of 'em. Now you know what the scorpion who stung you's up against! You lie there and think about it, cocky; I'll show ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... And, hush'd in peace, The flatten'd surges smoothly spread, Deep silence keep, And seem to sleep Recumbent on their oozy bed; ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... true of Israel that they had 'not passed this way heretofore,' inasmuch as the path which was opening before them, through the oozy bed of the river, had never been seen by human eye, nor trodden by man's foot. Their old leader was dead. There were only two of the whole host that had ever been out of the desert in their lives. They had a hard task before them. Jericho lay there, gleaming across the plain, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... a lump of soft, oozy blackness. One could tell from the way that Arcot's mind handled it that it was soft. It seemed cold, terribly cold. ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... the exercise of mind, And that best art, the art to know mankind.— Nor was his energy confin'd alone To friends around his philosophick throne; Its influence wide improv'd our letter'd isle, And lucid vigour mark'd the general style: As Nile's proud waves, swol'n from their oozy bed, First o'er the neighbouring meads majestick spread; Till gathering force, they more and more expand, And with new virtue fertilise the land. Thus sings the Muse, to Johnson's memory just, And scatters praise and censure ...
— A Poetical Review of the Literary and Moral Character of the late Samuel Johnson (1786) • John Courtenay
... milky foam, A fair cloth wrought with cunning imagery Of hounds in chase, a waxen honey-comb Dripping with oozy gold which scarce the bee Had ceased from building, a black skin of oil Meet for the wrestlers, a great boar ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... is undoubtedly an attractive subject. But, as I said before, this place stifles me. I think the hotel is too near the river,—there is an oozy smell from the Nile that I hate, and the heat is perfectly sulphureous. Don't you find ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... regale his hearing on days of salutation; nor did he forget the sweet sound of mooring and unmooring ships in the river, and the pleasing objects on the other side of the Thames, displayed in the oozy docks and cabbage-gardens of Rotherhithe. Sir Launcelot was not insensible to the beauties of this landscape, but, his pursuit lying another way, he contented himself with a less enchanting situation, and Crowe accompanied him out ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... energy confin'd alone To friends around his philosophick throne; Its influence wide improv'd our letter'd isle. And lucid vigour marked the general style: As Nile's proud waves, swoln from their oozy bed. First o'er the neighbouring meads majestick spread; Till gathering force, they more and more expand. And with new virtue ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... could without man's help to make this great valley most delightful to the eye. But the wolves still prowled and howled; the briers grew rough and rank; the grass, coarse and thin; the heathered hills were oozy and cold in their watery beds; the clumpy, shrubby trees wore the same ragged coats of moss; and no feature of the scene mended for the better from year ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... so rapidly, the water slid down off the flats to join the hurrying water in the channel. And, presto, all of a sudden there was the Isle of Desserts high and dry surrounded by an ocean of oozy mud while the river, narrowed to a mere brook, rushed in its channel some fifty feet distant. And there ...
— Pee-Wee Harris Adrift • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... prejudicial to health. They are obliged to stand in water often times mid-leg high, exposed to the scorching heat of the sun, and breathing an atmosphere poisoned by the unwholesome effluvia of an oozy bottom ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... known as the "First Relief." Their route to the snow-belt lay through sections of country which had become so soft and oozy that the horses often sank in mire, flank deep; and the streams were so swollen that progress was alarmingly slow. On the second day they were driven into camp early by heavy rains which drenched clothing, blankets, and even the provisions carefully ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton
... now bestirred himself and began a leisurely journey downstream, stopping when an unusually succulent root showed itself above the oozy bed. He had traveled far, lured by tempting food always just ahead. Suddenly his heart seemed to stand still and he gazed down stream with bulging eyes. Coming swiftly toward him, swimming with a sinuous ease which struck terror to the muskrat's heart, was a long, brown animal whose ...
— Followers of the Trail • Zoe Meyer
... there was when they had surmounted the chine and began to descend toward the north upon other people's land. Here all was damp and cold and slow; and chalk looked slimy instead of being clean; and shadowy places had an oozy cast; and trees (wherever they could stand) were facing the east with wrinkled visage, and the west with wiry beards. Willie (who had, among other great inventions, a scheme for improvement of the climate) ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... place, an union between us is impossible; and this fact it is which would attach disgrace to you, and a want of honor, principle, and gratitude to me. We should necessarily lead the lives of the guilty, and seek the wildest fastnesses of the mountain solitudes and the oozy caverns of ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... before our faces, so that we had to raise our hands to part them. It rained as it always does here. While we young people were venturing on a short canter, my saddle turned completely, and I landed on my feet in an oozy place, fortunately unhurt. A few miles short of the half-way house,—miles are not measured by feelings there,—my horse gave out. For some time he had walked lame in all his feet, and at last refused to go at all. One of the young gentlemen lent me his horse, and led mine. ...
— Scenes in the Hawaiian Islands and California • Mary Evarts Anderson
... stream—too noisy to be any thing else than shallow. There had been no frost since the sharp and keen wintry weather in December, and the heavy rains which had fallen since had flooded the stream, and made the lowlands soft and oozy with undrained moisture. My guide and I trudged along in silence for almost ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... primeval lake-dwellings, about these shelters on the deserted shore; two or three large fetichistic stones stand near their entrance; wickerwork objects of dark meaning strew the ground; a few stakes emerge, hard by, out of the placid and oozy waters. In such a cabin, methinks, dwelt those two old fishermen of Theocritus—here they lived and slumbered side by side on a couch of sea moss, among the rude ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... contents out upon the deck. The net was then drawn away, the bunt fastened up, the end thrown over, and the trawl-beam took all down to scrape once more over the sands and scoop-out the soles and other flat-fish that are so fond of scuffling themselves down in the soft oozy sand, flapping their side-fins about till they are half covered, and very often letting the trawl-rope ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... fading daffodils, while a blackthorn bush was a mass of pure white stars. At the far end, instead of a hedge, lay the moat, a shallow stagnant pool, bordered with drooping willows, tall reeds, and rushes that reared their spear-like stems from the dark oozy water. Originally this moat had encircled the mansion as a means of defence, but now, like the ruined gateway, its mission was long past, and it survived, a sleepy witness to the warfare of our forefathers, and a picturesque adjunct to the general beauty of ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil
... not wide, but the sea-breeze, which blows every day from ten or twelve o'clock till sunset, makes it easy for any ship to go in before the wind; and it grows wider as the town is approached, so that a-breast of it there is room for the largest fleet, in five or six fathom water, with an oozy bottom. At the narrow part, the entrance is defended by two forts. The principal is Santa Cruz, which stands on the east point of the bay, and has been mentioned before; that on the west side is called Fort Lozia, and is built upon a rock that lies close to the main; the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... their little shelter, her thin, freckly hands busy with the worsted masterpiece that she was working. Pee-wee, at least, had his appetite to console him, but she had no relish for the stale lemonade and melting, oozy taffy which stood pathetically ...
— Pee-wee Harris • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... scarce begin From its impulses within— Nature's stern necessity, To be schooled in cruelty,— Monster, waging ruthless war:— And with instincts better far Must I have less liberty? Fish are born, the spawn that breeds Where the oozy sea-weeds float, Scarce perceives itself a boat, Scaled and plated for its needs, When from wave to wave it speeds, Measuring all the mighty sea, Testing its profundity To its depths so dark and chill:— And with so much freer will, Must I have less liberty? ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... that the earth was made up of vast depositions of matter which contained the remains of long-extinct creatures, whose fragments were buried in solid rocks, once soft, oozy mud; when it was found that other rocks, hundreds of feet in thickness, were wholly composed of the imperishable remains of other extinct animals, which once lived and died and were gathered together in waters which broke over the very spot where these rocks now rise; when it was found that untold ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... long-frozen soil and heating the foul moistures of the earth, brings to life and to the surface of the ground swarming myriads of noxious insects and reptiles, who, during the long winter months, have slept silent and torpid far down within the oozy depths, and hatches the thrice-told myriads of eggs deposited in seasons passed away, and which have long waited for his life-giving influence to pour forth their swarming millions to the upper air; even so this war has hatched the eggs of error, and brought ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... to sea Extended, pervious to the God of Day: Uncouthly join'd, the rocks stupendous form An arch, the ruin of a future storm: High on the cliff their nests the woodquests make, And sea-calves stable in the oozy lake. But when bleak Winter with his sullen train Awakes the winds to vex the watery plain; When o'er the craggy steep without control, Big with the blast, the raging billows roll; Not towns beleaguer'd, not ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... hither bends his steps at last. Then, thro' the gate of iv'ry, he dismiss'd His valiant offspring and divining guest. Straight to the ships Aeneas his way, Embark'd his men, and skimm'd along the sea, Still coasting, till he gain'd Cajeta's bay. At length on oozy ground his galleys moor; Their heads are turn'd to sea, their sterns ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... 2, who gave one agonized squeal, in which the pig in her arms joined. Fortunately, her victim did not get her whole weight or there would have been one pig the less in this vale of tears. Chicken Little squashed him down gently into some two inches of oozy mud and water. It splashed in all directions, baptizing Katy and Gertie and the fleeing pig as well as completing the ruin of Jane's pink gingham frock, fresh ...
— Chicken Little Jane on the Big John • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... to place beacons, and mark out a sand-bank at the entrance, which borders a channel that extends along the main land. Then you enter a bay nearly a league in length, and half a league in breadth. In some places, the bottom is oozy and sandy, where vessels may get aground. The sea falls and rises there to the extent of four or five fathoms. We landed to see whether we could find the mines which Prevert had reported to us. Having gone about a quarter of a league along certain mountains, we found ...
— Voyages of Samuel de Champlain, Vol. 2 • Samuel de Champlain
... up." Matthews caught hold of the leg and pulled and pulled. There was a splutter of snorts, and, 'what in Hell's,' and the fat girth of an apple-shaped body ripped the tent pegging free and came out under the tepee skirt followed by another leg, and two oozy hands flabbily clawing at the grass roots to stop the unusual exit. One hand held a flat flask and the air became flavored with the second-hand fumes of a whiskey cask. The sheriff rolled over after the manner of apple-shaped bodies and sat up on the ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... was a cry. Ray had found the water falling from an oozy bank, and there we dozed fitfully until we were startled ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... running deep, with muddy banks, and a muddy bottom, and, taking the lightest of the guns, they tried first to get it across. Many of the men waded neck deep into the water and strove at the wheels. But the stream went completely over the cannon, which also sank deeper and deeper in the oozy bottom. It then became an effort to save the gun. The Panther put all his strength at the wheel, and, a dozen others helping, they at last got it back to the bank from which ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler
... who, wandering in our coasts, planted a small town on purchased ground, to whom we gave fields by the shore and laws of settlement, she hath spurned our alliance and taken Aeneas for lord of her realm. And now that Paris, with his effeminate crew, his chin and oozy hair swathed in the turban of Maeonia, takes and keeps her; since to thy temples we bear oblation, and hallow ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... in oozy mud as she scrambled on board, but that was a trifle compared with the relief of being ferried over the river. Her knight-errant was neither young nor handsome, being, indeed, rather bald and stout, but no orthodox interesting hero of fiction could have ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... is no English bird, not even the swan, so perfectly and absolutely graceful as the heron. I am leaning now breathless and noiseless against the gate, taking a good look at him, as he stands half-knee deep on the oozy bottom, with his long neck arched over the water, and his keen purple eye fixed eagerly upon the fish below. Though I am still twenty yards from where he poises lightly on his stilted legs, I can ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... with a rank vegetation, beneath which the water ran in a strong and rapid stream that issued to the upper air from the bottom of the range. In trying to cross this channel, my horse became entangled in the dense vegetation, whose roots, planted in rich and oozy soil, induced the tops of this remarkable plant to grow ten, twelve, and fifteen feet high. It had a nasty gummy, sticky feel when touched, and emitted a strong, coarse odour of peppermint. The botanical ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... hold was passed, the oozy road That separates the marsh, the grove sublime (5) Where reigns the Scythian goddess, and the path By which men bear the fasces to the feast On Alba's summit. From the height afar — Gazing in awe upon the walls of ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... then there was the cool blue of sunny, wind-swept waters winding hither and thither toward the sea, and sometimes miles of deep forest swamp through which the railroad went by broad, frowzy, treeless clearings flanked with impassable oozy ditches; ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... change his bed of fiery rich array, For a hammock at the roaring bows, or an oozy couch of clay; Our anchor must soon change the lay of merry craftsmen here, For the "Yeo-heave-o'!" and the "Heave-away!" and the sighing seaman's cheer; When, weighing slow, at eve they go—far, far from love and home; And sobbing ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various
... lip and turned to Miss Honey, who arrived panting, with the General firmly secured by the band of his overalls. An oozy green paste dripped from his hand; one of the pink wings intermittently ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... just breaking oozy and grey at the swell of the prairie over the Jumping Sandhills. They lay quiet and shining in the green-brown plain; but I knew that there was a churn beneath which could set those swells of sand ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... yelped loud in the Race: The tide swings round in the Race, and they're plaining whisht and low, And they come from the gray sea-marshes, where the gray sea-lavenders grow, And the cotton-grass sways to and fro; And the gore-sprent sundews thrive With oozy hands alive. Canst hear the curlews' whistle through thy dreamings dark and drear, How they're crying, crying, crying, ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... as the column emerged from St. Louis Gate, the scene before them was a dismal one. As yet there was no sign of spring. Each leafless bush and tree was dark with clammy moisture; patches of bare earth lay oozy and black on the southern slopes: but elsewhere the ground was still covered with snow, in some places piled in drifts, and everywhere sodden with rain; while each hollow and depression was full of that half-liquid, lead-colored ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... cheerful light of day—clothing ourselves with elemental sparks, and shooting with fiery speed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, from hemisphere to hemisphere, far down among the uncouth monsters that wallow in the nether seas, along the wreck-paved floor, thorough the oozy dungeons of the rayless deep; the last intelligence of the crops, whose dancing tassels will in a few months be coquetting with the west wind on those boundless prairies, flashing along the slimy decks ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... The demon saw her champions die. With drying wounds that scarcely bled Back to her brother's home she fled. Oppressed with pain, with loud lament At Khara's feet the monster bent. There like a plant whence slowly come The trickling drops of oozy gum, With her grim features pale with pain She poured her tears in ceaseless rain, There routed Surpanakha lay, And told her brother all, The issue of the bloody ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... as 'tis said, Before was never made, But when of old the sons of morning sung, While the Creator great His constellations set, And the well-balanced world on hinges hung,[115] And cast the dark foundations deep, And bid the weltering waves their oozy ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... and oozy, but as every boy wore either rubber boots or storm rubbers, they did not mind the mud. Perry Phelps said if they were going to explore, he thought it would be a good plan to follow the brook ...
— Sunny Boy and His Playmates • Ramy Allison White
... passed during the end of the day where a horse could muddy a dragging rope. The lake shore was sand and gravel. And, before he had gone to bed that night, he had seen a straggling stream which a little further on ran across the morrow's trail, making shallow ponds in the grass, the banks oozy mud. ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... thence. For not with eye, by any cloud obscur'd, Would it be seemly before him to come, Who stands the foremost minister in heaven. This islet all around, there far beneath, Where the wave beats it, on the oozy bed Produces store of reeds. No other plant, Cover'd with leaves, or harden'd in its stalk, There lives, not bending to the water's sway. After, this way return not; but the sun Will show you, that now rises, where to take The ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... other, though badly wounded, was flying lamely. My dog retrieved the one and brought it to me; but noticing that the other was diving down into the ditch, I sprang forward to catch it. Trusting to my boots, which came high up the leg, I put one foot forward; it sank in the oozy ground; and so, although I got the goose, the boot of my right leg was full of water. I lifted my foot and let the water run out; then, when I had mounted, we made haste for Rome. The cold, however, was very great, and I felt my leg freeze, so ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... the swift and oozy drift a woman climbed in fear, Clutching to her a black fox fur as if she held it dear; And hard she pressed it to her breast—then Windy ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... down upon a stream flowing to the northwest. But the joy was short-lived. The descent of this mountain's side was by all odds the most terrible piece of trail we had yet found. It led down the north slope, and was oozy and slippery with the melting snow. It dropped in short zigzags down through a grove of tangled, gnarled, and savage cedars and pines, whose roots were like iron and filled with spurs that were sharp as chisels. The horses, sliding upon their haunches and unable to turn ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... we gained the edge of the lake, and having passed the cascade were skirting the river when, with a suddenness that took me completely by surprise, she slipped from my grasp, and with a wild exclamation dashed towards the warm, oozy bank. ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... placed myself in the sight of one of the lizards, and offered my body to its attack. The challenge was accepted. It swooped like a dropping stone, and I swerved and drove in the lance at its oozy eye. ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... at the outset, has suddenly changed, and about ten o'clock at night there poured upon us, untented and unprotected, a furious storm of rain, sleet, and snow, making our condition almost unendurable. We are now left in a bed of almost fathomless mire. None of the men who flounder through these oozy roads, under the inclement sky, will ever forget the "Muddy March." We had scarcely reached the river-shore before we were compelled to return. In one instance a piece of artillery with its horses had to be abandoned, submerged so deeply in the mud that it was considered impracticable to extricate ...
— Three Years in the Federal Cavalry • Willard Glazier
... folds were wound. Vain, vain was the shout, that in battle rout, Had rung as a knell in the ear of the foe, For the bursting deck was heaved from the wreck, And the sky was bathed in the awful glow! The ocean shook to its oozy bed, As the swelling sound to the canopy went, And the splintered fires like meteors shed Their light o'er the tossing element. A moment they gleamed, then sank in the foam, And darkness swept over the gorgeous glare— ...
— Poems • Sam G. Goodrich
... as if blown in off the icy lake, and oozy April fell from the clouds. How weary we grow of winter in a cold land, and how loath is winter to permit the coming of spring! May stole in from the south. There came a warm rain, and the next morning strips of green were stretched along ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... High Beech, and then leaving the road we wandered in among big trees and down slopes ankle deep with rustling leaves towards Chingford again. Here was pleasanter walking than the thawing clay, but now and then one felt the threat of an infinite oozy softness beneath the stiff frozen leaves. Once again while we were here the drifting haze of the sky became thinner, and the smooth green-grey beech stems and rugged oak trunks were brightly illuminated. But only for a moment, and thereafter the sky became not simply unsympathetic ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... where he was at the edge of the moat. He stooped, and waving his torch along the ground he moved to the far angle of the chateau, examining the soft, oozy clay. It was impossible that a man could have clambered out over that without leaving some impression. He reached the corner and found the clay intact; at least, nowhere could he discover a mark of hands or a footprint set ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... of the Skull and Spectacles could assuage, and the gentlemen of the Chisholm Hunt would have discovered that the only way after a run with the harriers was through the vilest part of the town and among the oozy timbers of the wharves which formed the kingdom of ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... on which I now lay was of soft, oozy silt; about me were rocks, slippery and covered with a coating of grey-green slime. Spots in the slime moved. I could hear it, or rather feel it—a sort of bubbling quake, mere beginnings of the life impulse. The tops and sides of the rocks were festooned with waving green fringes of growths, ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... sin tells upon character, and makes the repetition of itself more and more easy. 'None is barren among them.' And all sin is linked together in a slimy tangle, like a field of seaweed, so that the man once caught in its oozy fingers is almost sure to ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... least 500 miles from any land, as we term it, yet it was surrounded by sunny islands, teeming for it with the most delicious food, and where it either basked in the warm daylight, or shaded itself in some oozy recess, as seemed ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... parts have little to do now-a-days, and must have had still less during the Pontificate of His Holiness Pope Clement XIV.; and we can imagine how all the windows of the unplastered houses, all the black and oozy doorways, must have been lined with heads of women and children; how the principal square of each town, where the horses were changed, must have been crowded with inquisitive townsfolk and peasants, whispering, as ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... through vast fields of paddy, some covered with the stubble of the recently cut rice, while others were being prepared for a new crop by such profuse irrigation that the buffaloes seemed to be ploughing knee-deep through the thick, oozy soil. It was easy to understand how unhealthy must be the task of cultivating a rice-field, and what swampy and pestiferous odours must arise from the brilliant vegetation. 'Green as grass' is a feeble expression to those familiar ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... for bacon; furry creatures innumerable, all good for meat or skin. Fish of the infinite sea breaking their bark-fibre nets; fowl innumerable, migrant in the skies, for their flint-headed arrows; bred horses for their own riding; ships of no mean size, and of all sorts, flat-bottomed for the oozy puddles, keeled and decked for strong Elbe stream and furious Baltic on the one side, for mountain-cleaving Danube and the black lake of Colchos ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... six feet, and the average flow is said not to amount to more than two feet six inches—but even this flux is sufficient to produce large tracts of sea which the reflux converts into square miles of oozy sand. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... fled;— Friend yet unknown! What tho' a brainless rout Usurp the sacred title of the Bard— What tho' the chilly wide-mouth'd chorus From Styx or Lethe's oozy Channel croak: So was it, Peter, in the times before us When Momus throwing on his Attic cloak Romp'd with the Graces and each tickled Muse The plighted coterie of Phoebus he bespoke And laughing with reverted faces ran, And somewhat the broad ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... fancied that I saw a woman in a white robe of some sort stretched out as though asleep. And it seemed to me, though I could not tell why, that all this flotsam, and my own hulk along with it, slowly was drifting closer and closer together; and was packing tighter and tighter in the soft oozy tangle of the weed, which everywhere was matted so thickly that the water ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... really dredged up from the bottom, and that they had been living and feeding there, appeared from the fact that their stomachs were full of Globigerina, of which foraminiferous creatures, both living and dead, the oozy bed of the ocean at that vast depth was found to ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... yet, my Delia, to the main Runs the sweet tide without a stain, Unsullied as it seems; The nymphs of many a sable flood Deform with streaks of oozy mud The ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... coals, shading his eyes with one hand, and holding a little stick in the other, with which he regulated the hissing contents of the frying-pan. The horses were turned to feed among the scattered bushes of a low oozy meadow. A drowzy springlike sultriness pervaded the air, and the voices of ten thousand young frogs and insects, just awakened into life, rose in varied chorus from ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... a train. But everything is quite different when you walk into a tunnel on your own feet, and tread on shifting, sliding stones and gravel on a path that curves downwards from the shining metals to the wall. Then you see slimy, oozy trickles of water running down the inside of the tunnel, and you notice that the bricks are not red or brown, as they are at the tunnel's mouth, but dull, sticky, sickly green. Your voice, when you speak, is quite changed from what ...
— The Railway Children • E. Nesbit
... his house and of his bank—saw the misfortunes of the peasantry; the mill, the cottage by the riverside, invaded by the flood; the doors burst open by the tremendous rushing stream, the stables and garners filled with the thick and oozy waters; the poor creatures, yesterday prosperous, clinging to the roof, watching their sheep and cows, their hay, and straw, and flour, the hemp bleached in the summer, the linen spun and woven in the long winter, their furniture and chattels, their labour and their hope whirled ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... this oozy mass so fatal a vapour that no animal can endure it. The black water bears a greenish-brown floating scum, which for ever bubbles up from the putrid mud of the bottom. When the wind collects the miasma, and, as ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... importance, of something tremendous to do, animated the company like wine, made the packs and the belts seem less heavy, made their necks and shoulders less stiff from struggling with the weight of the packs, made the ninety-six legs tramp jauntily in spite of the oozy mud and ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... my train attending From their oozy tombs below, Through the hoary foam ascending, Here I feed my constant woe: Here the Bastimentos viewing, We recall our shameful doom, And our plaintive cries renewing, Wander ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... strength for a swift and vigorous effort. Then, filling his lungs very moderately, the better to endure a strain, he stooped suddenly downward, deep into the yellow gloom, and began wrenching with all his force at those oozy curves, striving to drag them apart. They gave a little, but not enough to release the imprisoned foot. Another moment, and he had to lift his ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... were stopped and turned back at the boom near Drewry's Bluff. McClellan, bent on besieging Richmond in due form, crawled cautiously about the intervening swamps of the oozy Chickahominy. McDowell, who could not advance alone, remained at Fredericksburg. Shields stood behind him, near Catlett's Station, to keep ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... and still rich under foot, although it froze hard every night; but all along the brook's marge there were many small oozy bubbling springlets, which it required a stinging night to congeal; and round these the ground was poached up by the cattle, and laid bare in spots of deep, soft, black loam; and the innumerable chalkings told the experienced eye at half a glance, that, where they ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... O heavens! that they were living both in Naples, The king and queen there! That they were, I wish Myself were mudded in that oozy bed Where my son lies. When did you lose ...
— The Tempest • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... repairs his drooping head, And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore Flames in the forehead of the morning sky; So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high, Through the dear might of Him that walked the waves, Where, other groves and other streams along, With nectar pure his oozy locks he laves, And hears the unexpressive nuptial song, In the blest kingdoms meek of joy and love. There entertain him all the saints above, In solemn troops and sweet societies, That sing, and singing ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... up anchor!' The capstan revolves and creaks, as one and all of these willing men strain their starting muscles at the bars. The anchor reluctantly leaves its oozy bed; but the chinking of the cable, as it steadily ascends, reveals no change, until it swings at ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... seize The amber fruit that is used to grease The itching palm in Shekel's Disease,— On a long long v'yage, as busy as bees, Never stopping for a moment to take our ease, Never changing our course, except when the breeze Took to blowing to windward,—we had slipped by degrees Down the oozy slopes of the Hebrides, And passed through the locks of the Florida Keys, Which in getting through was a rather tight squeeze, But danger is nothing to men like these, When suddenly the lookout, ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen
... that all hope of maturity was out of the question. Low meadows were in a state of inundation, and on alluvial soils the ravages of the floods Were visible in layers of mud and gravel that were deposited over many of the prostrate corn fields. The peat turf lay in oozy and neglected heaps, for there had not been sun enough to dry it sufficiently for use, so that the poor had want of fuel, and cold to feel, as well as want of food itself. Indeed, the appearance of the ...
— The Black Prophet: A Tale Of Irish Famine • William Carleton
... bells and sunflowers indeed! What should you say to bells of real silver, glowing and shining? To fair maids blossoming and curtseying in the flower-beds, fair maids so beautiful that the Knight would fain have stopped with them all day? To roses flowering everywhere? To lillies trickling oozy scent into gold bowls laid ready to receive it? To whole bowers of honeysuckle, and whole beds of lavender? To hedges of every flowering shrub imaginable? To lofty trees whose leaves whispered soft invitations to the passers-by to come and sleep beneath ...
— More Tales in the Land of Nursery Rhyme • Ada M. Marzials
... furzy opening dotted with old oaks, where the black pigs of the cottagers would by and by feast and grow fat on their common rights. It was a lovely, damp, perilous spot, haunted by the ghost of fever and ague. The soft, vivid turf was oozy there, and the long-rooted stones were clothed with wet, rusted moss. The few cottages of the hamlet wore deep hoods of thatch, and stood amongst prosperous orchards; one of them, a little larger than the rest, being the habitation of Mr. ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... the compass or to building laws of any kind. Stumps and logs, like precious monuments, adorned its two streets, each stump and log, on account of the moist climate, moss-grown and tufted with grass and bushes, but muddy on the sides below the limit of the bog-line. The ground in general was an oozy, mossy bog on a foundation of jagged rocks, full of concealed pit-holes. These picturesque rock, bog, and stump obstructions, however, were not so very much in the way, for there were no wagons or carriages there. There was not a horse on the island. The domestic animals were represented ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... beach of sand, Where the water bounds the elfin land; Thou shalt watch the oozy brine Till the sturgeon leaps in the ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... up with great spirit, till Boreas, interfering in the shape of a stiffish "Nor'- wester," drifted the bone (and flesh) of contention ashore on the Shurland domain, where it lay in all the majesty of mud. It was soon discovered by the retainers, and dragged from its oozy bed, grinning worse than ever. Tidings of the godsend were of course carried instantly to the castle; for the Baron was a very great man; and if a dun cow had flown across his property unannounced by the warder, the Baron would have pecked him, the said warder, from the topmost battlement into the ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various
... pondering mountains; there the dim, dumb ranges loom— Ghostly shapes in dead grey vapour—half-seen peaks august with gloom. There the voice of troubled torrents, hidden in unfathomed deeps, Known to moss and faint green sunlight, wanders down the oozy steeps. There the lake of many runnels nestles in a windless wild Far amongst thick-folded forests, like a radiant human child. And beyond surf-smitten uplands—high above the highest spur— Lo! the clouds like tents of tempest on the ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... were intended, especially, for use in despatching tomatoes and they never failed to make good. There, upon the bulletin board was a vivid area which looked like the midday sun. From it trickled an oozy mass, down over the list of uncalled for letters, straight through the prize awards of yesterday, obliterating the Council Call, and bathing the list of new arrivals in soft and pulpy red. The "hike for to-morrow," as shown, ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... Mrs. Dangerfield's devotion with his avowal of an answering passion. He pressed forward swiftly like a conqueror; and like a conqueror he whistled. Then he found the clothes-line, suddenly, pitched forward and fell, not heavily, for the mud was thick, but sprawling. He rose, oozy and dripping, took a long breath, and the welkin shuddered as ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... barren life she was born to, made her thoroughly miserable and morbid; and one summer's evening she sought relief in the quiet, homely stream that flowed by the Old Manse, and found the end of earthly troubles in its oozy depths. Hawthorne was roused by Curtis himself coming beneath his window (precisely as Coverdale comes to summon Hollingsworth), and with one other they went out on the river, to find the poor girl's body. "The man," writes his friend, "whom the villagers had only seen at morning ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... spread Where with surface dull like lead Arabian pools of slime invite Manticors down from neighbouring height To dip heads, to cool fiery blood In oozy depths of sucking mud. Sing then of ringstraked manticor, Man-visaged tiger who of yore Held whole Arabian waste in fee With raging pride from sea to sea, That every lesser tribe would fly Those armed feet, that hooded eye; Till preying on himself at last Manticor ...
— Country Sentiment • Robert Graves
... wind blust'rous, A ribbed tract of cloudy malachite Curve a shored crescent wide; And on its slope marge shelving to the night The stranded moon lay quivering like a lustrous Medusa newly washed up from the tide, Lay in an oozy pool of its own ...
— Sister Songs • Francis Thompson
... sharp turn to the left, nosing along the bank, then stole down a waterway, a crystal channel between ramparts of green. This looped at a right angle, shone with a sudden glaze of sun, slipped into shadow and, rounding a point, an island with a bare, oozy edge came into view. ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... already sitting up, endeavouring to get a breath of purer air. He rose to his feet, sinking almost to the top of his boots in the oozy slime. Foul gases were belched up to envelop him. He seized at irregularities in the bank, and got his head above the level of the ground. He thrust forward his chin and took great greedy breaths in a very gluttony of air—and never ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... as it looks!" said Mrs. Carteret, plunging in her hands and heroically smearing her face with a mass of black oozy matter believed to be a sponge. "It's quite becoming if you do it thoroughly. Mind, all of you, get it well into your ears and the roots ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... forth from thy oozy couch, O Ornithorhynchus dear! And greet with a cordial claw The stranger that ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... at times “screeved,” i.e., “split up,” in the process, and had to be slaughtered. The fen soil is a mass of decayed vegetation, chiefly moss, interlarded with silt, deposited by the sea, which formerly made its oozy way as far as Lincoln. Large trees of bog oak and other kinds are found in the soil. These, it is supposed, became rotted at their base by the accumulating peat; and the strong south-west winds, prevailing then ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... there are in those same tubes of oozy paint horrific visions like Franz Stuck's "War," or portraits of plutocrats by Bonnat, and as there are in ink-bottles sad potencies of tailors' bills and scathing reviews of this very book, so it is possible under the name of music to write fugues and five-finger exercises, ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 2 • Rupert Hughes
... savages were of the Celtic race, and that Gaelic was spoken in Scotland at a time when its strips of grassy links, and the sites of many of its seaport towns, such as Leith, Greenock, Musselburgh, and Cromarty, existed as oozy sea-beaches, covered twice every day by the ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... curse o'ertaken, Here I lie in slumber sunken; Here the youthful maid must languish On the bosom of the waters, And the bed is cold and oozy Where ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby
... shelving shore suddenly presented a footing for me. I rose, and was again thrown down by the breakers—a point of rock to which I was enabled to cling, gave me a moment's respite; and then, taking advantage of the ebbing of the waves, I ran forwards— gained the dry sands, and fell senseless on the oozy reeds that ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... Laminariaceae, or a tuft of filaments as in many instances. When the attachment is in sand or mud, it often simulates the appearance of a true root as in Chara or Caulerpa. It is clear that where the bottom of a lake or sea consists of oozy mud or shifting sand, it is impossible for algae to secure a foothold. Thus a rock emerging from a sandy beach may often be observed to stand covered with vegetation like an oasis in a desert. The rapidity with which walls, piles ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... as before, we pushed into the breast-high grass, and the walking was easy. Once we crossed a patch of oozy turf from which arose a score of jack-snipe; again we skirted a drying pond whose boggy edges were the hunting ground of marsh hens. Yet other trails could be read here: deer, wildcat, raccoon, and innumerable wee things. And here, too, around the "bonnet" leaves, the silent moccasin lay ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... sure a palate cover'd o'er With brass or steel, that on the rocky shore First broke the oozy oyster's pearly coat, And risk'd the living ...
— A Poetical Cook-Book • Maria J. Moss
... us regretted pouring sweat or strained sinews, when, at the end of our last terrible climb, we stood upon the oozy sod which is brightened into eternal emerald by the spray of Pi-wi-ack. Far below our slippery standing steeply sloped the walls of the ragged chasm down which the snowy river charges roaring after its first headlong plunge; an eternal rainbow flung its shimmering arch across ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... expanse of morass, about half a mile in width, and of length interminable, partly covered with water, with black knobs rising here and there above the surface, affording a precarious foothold for the animals in crossing it. Where the water was not, there lay in place of it a bed of black oozy mud, which looked as if it might give way under the foot, and let it, at each step, sink to ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... the beech there is a sandy, oozy shore, where the footprints of moorhens are often traceable. Many of the trees of the plantation stand in water after heavy rain; their leaves drop into it in autumn, and, being away from the influence of the current, stay and soak, and lie several layers thick. Their ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... among the reeds; I sit and stare about; Queer slimy things crawl through the weeds, Put to a sullen rout. I paddle under cypress trees; All fearfully I peer Through oozy channels when the breeze Comes rustling ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... lakes which, by their periodical rising and sinking, give so much trouble that there is talk, equally periodical, of draining them off altogether. This one, they say, shifts continually and sometimes reaches so low a level that rich crops are planted in its oozy ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... "Beware the oozy spots along the border of the marsh. I've had no end of trouble getting stuck instead of duck," called out Bones, as the other moved away, carrying his gun along with him as ...
— The Boys of Columbia High on the Gridiron • Graham B. Forbes
... a battered funnel and a bridge all blocked with hatches. That the beautiful shiny Corydon? There was the name on her stern—Corydon, London. She was loading coal from a big elevator. Her decks were piled high with it, and where there wasn't coal there was mud, black oozy mud, and ashes and ropes and soppy hatches. I climbed up the ladder and one by one got my grips aboard. And I stood there in the rain, my gloves all black with the coal on the ladder, my nice mackintosh barred with it, and my boots slipping on the iron plates. No one took any ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... were bare And black along the turbid brook; When catkined willows blurred and shook Great tawny tangles in the air; In bottomlands, the first thaw makes An oozy bog, beneath the trees, Prophetic of the spring that wakes, Sang the ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... finding the boat too fast aground for him to stir it, hallooed out for the rest, who were straggling about: upon which they all soon came to the boat: but it was past all their strength to launch her, the boat being very heavy, and the shore on that side being a soft oozy sand, almost like a quicksand. In this condition, like true seamen, who are, perhaps, the least of all mankind given to forethought, they gave it over, and away they strolled about the country again; and I heard ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... fastened; and he uncovered a spring of water, in the middle of the stone floor, which he told us had miraculously gushed up to enable the saint to baptize his jailer. The miracle was perhaps the more easily wrought, inasmuch as Jugurtha had found the floor of the dungeon oozy with wet. However, it is best to be as simple and childlike as we can in these matters; and whether St. Peter stamped his visage into the stone, and wrought this other miracle or no, and whether ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... her husband, and he had left his roots behind in his little place at Clonmena, where, as we know, he had farmed not wisely, but too well, and had been put out of it for his pains to expend his energy upon our oozy black sods and stark-white boulders. But instead he moped about fretting for his fair green fields and few proudly-cherished beasts—especially the little old Kerry cow. And at his funeral the neighbours said: "Ah bedad, poor man, God help him, he niver held up his head agin ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... laurels to be burned before it, that as Daphnis had tormented her by his infidelity, so he in his turn may be agitated with a returning constancy. She prays that as the wanton heifer pursues the steer through woods and glens, till at length, worn out with fatigue, she lies down on the oozy reeds by the banks of the stream, and the night-dew is unable to induce her to withdraw, so Daphnis may be led on after her for ever with inextinguishable love. She buries the relics of what had belonged to Daphnis beneath her threshold. She bruises ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... when whirled beneath the bloody tide To Peleus' stormy son his spoils he left. Sarpedon with the noble Glaucus led Their warriors forth from farthest Lycia, where Xanthus deep-dimpled rolls his oozy tide. 1075 ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... nature, even in unhappiness, called aloud for solitude. He must struggle alone through his deep waters: waters of the soul, wherein float neither life-preserver nor raft, rope or even light; neither coral reef nor oozy grave, for such as he. Darkness and struggle alike lasted till the end of his strength; but, with exhaustion and the coming of dawn, came at last one mighty breaker, by which Ivan was thrown high upon the strand of a ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... forces of Nature. Their clothes were torn, their flesh abraded, their strength exhausted. They could have slept, but the ground offered no place, for wherever the foot rested an instant the weight of the body pushed it down into the oozy soil until water gushed in over the shoe-tops. Jones had found the struggle hardest because he had not the youth of the others nor their light frames. The striplings were spared many of his hardships and were still able to endure the ordeal, if ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... James, Allied in fate, increase with theirs her flames. Of all our navy none shall now survive, But that the ships themselves were taught to dive, And the kind river in its creek them hides. Freighting their pierced keels with oozy tides." ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... banks; and nearer still, lonely and unprosperous by the bleak water-side, lay the lost little port of Slaughden, with its forlorn wharfs and warehouses of decaying wood, and its few scattered coasting-vessels deserted on the oozy river-shore. No fall of waves was heard on the beach, no trickling of waters bubbled audibly from the idle stream. Now and then the cry of a sea-bird rose from the region of the marsh; and at intervals, from farmhouses far in the ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... at least two miles from the camp when they heard noises that indicated the passage of a small body of the Indians, and as they stepped behind trees to conceal themselves Shif'less Sol's foot suddenly sank with a bubbling sound into an oozy spot. In an instant, all the Indians stopped. Henry and his comrade heard rustling sounds for a moment, and then there was complete silence. The two knew that the warriors had taken to cover, and that probably they would not escape without a fight. They were intensely annoyed as they ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... was kept viciously going, but it could not drag the boat off. Then the crew toiled for an hour shifting what was movable to the stern, but without result. Next, an anchor was carried a hundred feet up stream and imbedded in the oozy bed of the river, while sturdy arms on board tugged at the connecting hawser by means of a windlass, with the screw desperately helping, but the hull would not yield an inch. Finally the efforts were given up. Nothing remained but to wait till the rising ...
— Up the Forked River - Or, Adventures in South America • Edward Sylvester Ellis |
