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Slime   Listen
noun
Slime  n.  
1.
Soft, moist earth or clay, having an adhesive quality; viscous mud. "As it (Nilus) ebbs, the seedsman Upon the slime and ooze scatters his grain."
2.
Any mucilaginous substance; any substance of a dirty nature, that is moist, soft, and adhesive.
3.
(Script.) Bitumen. (Archaic) "Slime had they for mortar."
4.
pl. (Mining) Mud containing metallic ore, obtained in the preparatory dressing.
5.
(Physiol.) A mucuslike substance which exudes from the bodies of certain animals.
Slime eel. (Zool.) See 1st Hag, 4.
Slime pit, a pit for the collection of slime or bitumen.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Slime" Quotes from Famous Books



... matter establishes the conclusion that matter, slime, or protoplasm never originated in the immortal Mind, and is therefore not 279:9 eternal. Matter is neither created by Mind nor for the manifestation and ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy

... cargo than at any other port of the continent, and the Bight of Biafra, on which Calabar is situated, was ever the busiest spot. Mangrove forests, unequalled anywhere for immensity and gloom, fringe the entire sweep of the Gulf. Rooted in slime, malodorous and malarious, they form a putrescent paradise for all manner of ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone

... down by the water-fronts are the slum wastes where the sewers of politics and business and social life pour forth their fetid filth. Here the journals of yellow shade grub and fatten. In this ooze and slime puddle the hordes of sewer rats, scavengers of the world's garbage, from whose collected stores the editor selects his daily mess for the delectation of the great unwashed, whether of the classes or of the masses, and from which ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor

... in the space of a quarter of a mile, barely pausing, following Captain Nemo whose gestures kept beckoning me onward. Soon the nature of the seafloor changed. The plains of sand were followed by a bed of that viscous slime Americans call "ooze," which is composed exclusively of seashells rich in limestone or silica. Then we crossed a prairie of algae, open-sea plants that the waters hadn't yet torn loose, whose vegetation grew ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne

... "Here's another as is in favor o' grime an' slime! It's three to three now. Ruth and Reuben have allays been for leavin' ...
— Aunt Rachel • David Christie Murray

... the sky, Their grandeur melts, their titles die, As hills of snow dissolve and run, Or snails that perish in their slime, Or births that come before their time, Vain births, that never see ...
— The Psalms of David - Imitated in the Language of The New Testament - And Applied to The Christian State and Worship • Isaac Watts

... SOUNDS IN CODFISH.—These are the air or swimming bladders, by means of which the fishes are enabled to ascend or descend in the water. In the Newfoundland fishery they are taken out previous to incipient putrefaction, washed from their slime and salted for exportation. The tongues are also cured and packed up in barrels; whilst, from the livers, considerable quantities of oil are extracted, this oil having been found possessed of the most nourishing properties, and particularly beneficial ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton

... day much diverted with a conversation that passed in the Pump-room, betwixt him and the famous Dr L—n, who is come to ply at the Well for patients. My uncle was complaining of the stink, occasioned by the vast quantity of mud and slime which the river leaves at low ebb under the windows of the Pumproom. He observed, that the exhalations arising from such a nuisance, could not but be prejudicial to the weak lungs of many consumptive patients, who ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett

... calling in the world would not bring him back. He was at last discovered on the banks of the Ganges, standing near a human body, which he kept licking. Mr. N—- went up and found that the man had been left to die, but had still some spark of life left. He summoned his attendants, had the slime and filth washed off the poor wretch's face, and wrapped him well up. In a few days after he was completely recovered. On Mr. N—-'s now being about to leave him, the man begged and prayed him not to do so, as he had lost his caste, ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer

... especially now we are a Sovereign State. What's the good of a Sovereign State if you can't define a sovereign? We can make anything a precious metal, as men could in the morning of the world. They didn't choose gold because it was rare; your scientists can tell you twenty sorts of slime much rarer. They chose gold because it was bright—because it was a hard thing to find, but pretty when you've found it. You can't fight with golden swords or eat golden biscuits; you can only look at it—and you can look at ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton

... stuff of our sheerest dreams is the stuff of our experience. As a child, a wee child, you dreamed you fell great heights; you dreamed you flew through the air as things of the air fly; you were vexed by crawling spiders and many-legged creatures of the slime; you heard other voices, saw other faces nightmarishly familiar, and gazed upon sunrises and sunsets other than you know now, looking back, you ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London

... sand, and is about three miles long. Its breadth at no point exceeds a quarter of a mile. It is separated from the main land by a scarcely perceptible creek, oozing its way through a wilderness of reeds and slime, a favorite resort of the marsh-hen. The vegetation, as might be supposed, is scant, or at least dwarfish. No trees of any magnitude are to be seen. Near the western extremity, where Fort Moultrie stands, ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson

... the pools dripping with human blood, the teeth struck out of the slain are carried on by the full torrent of gore, and are polished on the rough sands. Dashed on the slime they glitter, and the torrent of blood bears along splintered bones and flows above lopped limbs. The blood of the Danes is wet, and the gory flow stagnates far around, and the stream pressed out of the steaming veins rolls back the scattered bodies. Tirelessly against ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")

... be covered with yellow paper. The great stones—the rocks—of the walls are upholstered with a dark deposit of grease, like the bottom of a stewpan, and nests of dust hang from them. Black puddles gleam on the floor, with beds of slime from the ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse

... conviction that the most depressing and shuddersome of all natural prospects is the wide expanse of mud and slime to be found at low water in the estuary of a tidal river. Such scenes have always been singularly abhorrent to me. Mr. "ADRIAN ROSS" appears to share this feeling, for out of one of them he has made the novel and very effective setting ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 11, 1914 • Various

... in the last act of life, which is death. The Lord will move before us and open a safe, dry path for us between the heaped waters; and where the feet of our great High Priest, bearing the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord, stood, amidst the slime and the mud, we may plant our firm feet on the stones that He has left there. And so the stream of life, like the river of death, will be parted for Christ's followers, and they will pass over on dry ground, 'until all the people are passed ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... tears of blood to witness such destruction, such a sacrifice of the noblest people on the shrine of utter military incapacity. And the traitors, the imbeciles, and the intriguers sing hallelujah to McClellan, and daily throw their slime at Stanton. ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski

... where have you been?" asked Leonti suddenly, who had just noticed that Mark was covered up to the waist with wet and slime. ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov

... cliffs. From that direction the place is really inaccessible, and, were it not for a hardish ledge which runs at the very base of the precipice, we should have had to turn back. Many times we were up to our waists in the slime and blubber of an old, semi-tropical swamp. To make matters worse, the place seemed to be a favorite breeding-place of the Jaracaca snake, the most venomous and aggressive in South America. Again and again these ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle

... where there buzzed And sucked and settled creatures of the swamp, Hideous in wing and sting, gnat-clouds and flies, With moths, toads, newts, and snakes red-gulleted, And livid, loathsome worms, writhing in slime Forth from skull-holes and scalps and tumbled bones. A burning forest shut the roadside in On either hand, and 'mid its crackling boughs Perched ghastly birds, or flapped amongst the flames,— Vultures and ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold

... two, three, four! One, two!... It is hard to keep in time Marching through The rutted slime With no drum to play for you. One! two, three, four! And the shuffle of five hundred feet Till ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy

... represented the ideas of his day—a day penetrated with literal interpretation of the Scripture, though it is well to recall to our minds the fact that not one word or idea of the above is contained in the Bible. The only suggestion is that the body of Adam was fashioned from the "slime of the earth," the precise meaning of which phrase has never been ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle

... grows sour upon our palate. [she smiles over at CHARLES'S bewilderment] Which means, in the literal terms of those who credit reincarnation, that if we married, those things you would have to do to keep your heart up would cause your next showing to degenerate into a slight motion of slime at the base of mountains. Think of the distance lost, Charles, for such a little mincing forward step. Come, the morning wanes. Fortunately there are things to do, no matter what cannot be done. I shall return you half of your fortune, which, you will remember, is wholly ...
— Clair de Lune - A Play in Two Acts and Six Scenes • Michael Strange

... continents and every isle, He, less than Christ, succumbed to Demon Guile. Oh, God, that he should drop his mountain climb Below sea-level, and let earth the while, Fall back and settle in Primeval Slime! ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle

... researches; but a vague curiosity prompted me to continue them. Quitting the wall, I resolved to cross the area of the enclosure. At first I proceeded with extreme caution, for the floor, although seemingly of solid material, was treacherous with slime. At length, however, I took courage, and did not hesitate to step firmly; endeavoring to cross in as direct a line as possible. I had advanced some ten or twelve paces in this manner, when the remnant of the torn hem of my robe became entangled between my legs. I stepped on ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... yesterday As thoughts are reckoned,—and to-day you hear In words that sound as if from human tongues Those monstrous, uncouth horrors of the past That blot the blue of heaven and shame the earth As would the saurians of the age of slime, Awaking from their stony sepulchres And wallowing hateful in the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... of bricks banked up with sandbags and deep mine-craters filled with stinking water slopping over from the Bellewarde Lake and low-lying pools. Bodies, and bits of bodies, and clots of blood, and green metallic-looking slime, made by explosive gases, were floating on the surface of that water below the crater banks when I first passed that way, and so it was always. Our men lived there and died there within a few yards of the enemy, crouched below the sand-bags ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs

... and transact for hours the mental part of my day business, choosing the noxious from the useful. And in my dreams I shall be hauling on recalcitrants, and suffering stings from nettles, stabs from citron thorns, fiery bites from ants, sickening resistances of mud and slime, evasions of slimy roots, dead weight of heat, sudden puffs of air, sudden starts from bird-calls in the contiguous forest - some mimicking my name, some laughter, some the signal of a whistle, and living over again at large the business of ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson

... conclusion that if we skirted the bank in the opposite direction we would soon come to the neck of the water and be able to wade across it. This we did, but it was arduous walking—through mud and slime, with snakes darting out every now and then upon us, and huge crocodiles crawling out of our way, just as we almost set foot on them, which frightened some of the timid ones pretty much, I can ...
— The Penang Pirate - and, The Lost Pinnace • John Conroy Hutcheson

... unwashed decks. But there are few things more impressive to me than one of these ships lying up against some lonely quay in a black sea-fog, with the furrow traced under its tawny keel far in the harbor slime. The noble misery that there is in it, the might of its rent and strained unseemliness, its wave-worn melancholy, resting there for a little while in the comfortless ebb, unpitied, and claiming no ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin

... water! And such water! Thick, greasy, smelly! A carabao wallow it was. He now gave unmistakable evidence of an intention to lie down, when a friendly hand got me up on the bank, whereupon Bubud, concluding he would get out too, emerged with a coat of muddy slime. This seemed to have no effect whatever on his spirits, for on entering Solano a few minutes later, to the sound of bells and bands, with banners fluttering in the breeze, he got into such a swivet that before I knew it he was at the head ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox

... beasts the sun sent a drowsiness. The river monsters along the river's marge lay dormant in the slime. The sailors pitched a pavilion, with golden tassels, for the captain upon the deck, and then went, all but the helmsman, under a sail that they had hung as an awning between two masts. Then they told tales ...
— Tales of Three Hemispheres • Lord Dunsany

... where the old order and neatness had disappeared, and now in all directions there were the signs of carelessness and neglect. The once smooth lawn was now overgrown with tall grass; the margin of the pond was filled with rushes, and its surface with slime; some of the windows of the Hall were out, and some of the chimney-pots were broken; while over the road grass had been allowed to grow in many places. Edith recognized all this, and an involuntary sigh escaped her. The carriage at length stopped, and she got ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille

... are working in too near, Their carbines crackle louder every shot. I say! our chaps a-plodding in the rear Are getting it—and most uncommon hot! It's not much fun retreating in the night, Through all this mess of rain and reeking slime— It seems to me this boot's infernal tight! I must have hurt me when I slipped that time. Whew! that was close and there's a fellow gone! I know too well that heavy, sickening thud; It's bitter hard that we must keep right on And leave our wounded ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... the great rain would freshen the swamp proved true. All the mists and vapors were gone. There was no odor of decaying wood or of slime. It seemed as if the place had been cleaned and scrubbed until it was like a fine lake. Silent Tom caught bigger fish than ever, and they agreed that they were better to the taste, although they agreed also that it might be an effect of fancy. The island itself was dry and sunny, but from their ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler

... observed, there was not one of those collected at O Tahaiti; there were three new Distichoporae, Seriatipora, six kinds of Madrepora, two Porites, four Astrea, Pocillopora caerulea, and another kind, forming broad, yellow, leafy masses, the slime of which stings like a nettle; Cariophyllaea glabrescens Cham., and ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue

... to the Main Congaree; six or eight miles below Columbia. On the opposite side of this stream was a newly-constructed fort, and on our side—a wide extent of old cotton-fields, which, had been overflowed, and was covered with a deep slime. General Woods had deployed his leading brigade, which was skirmishing forward, but he reported that the bridge was gone, and that a considerable force of the enemy was on the other side. I directed General Howard or Logan to send a brigade by a circuit to the left, to see if this stream ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan

... visible revolution of the sun marked the days, and the universal darkness and cold prevented the changes of the seasons?), "when the world was in great darkness and chaos, when the earth was covered with water, and there was nothing but mud and slime on all the face of the earth—behold a god became visible, and his name was the Deer, and his surname was the Lion-snake. There appeared also a very beautiful goddess called the Deer, and surnamed the Tiger-snake. These two gods were the origin and beginning ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly

... knot-grass fettered there the hand Which once could burst an iron band; 100 Beneath the broad and ample bone, That bucklered heart to fear unknown, A feeble and a timorous guest, The fieldfare framed her lowly nest; There the slow blindworm left his slime 105 On the fleet limbs that mocked at time; And there, too, lay the leader's skull, Still wreathed with chaplet, flushed and full, For heath-bell with her purple bloom Supplied the bonnet and the plume. 110 All night, in this sad glen, the maid Sat, shrouded in her mantle's shade: ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott

... steamers, the size of tugs, but with upstanding bows and a sheer suggesting speed and buoyancy, were lying off the fish market, and mine, the Windhover, had the outside berth. I climbed over to her. Blubber littered her iron deck, and slime drained along her gutters. Black grits showered from her stack. The smell from her galley, and the heat from her engine-room casing, were challenging to a stranger. It was no place for me. The men and porters tramping about their jobs knew that, and did not order me out of ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson

... haunt, which for loathsome, stinking abomination, went beyond anything (with one sole exception) that I had set my eyes upon in hell,—where an accursed herd of drunken swine lay weltering in the foulest slime. ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne

... importance, than for the peculiarity of its position. As soon as I had emerged from the streets of Avranches, I saw before me a vast bay, now entirely deserted by the tide, and consisting partly of sand, partly of slime, intersected by the waters of several rivers, and covered, during spring tides, at high water.—Two promontories, the one bluff and rocky, the other sandy and low, project, one on either hand, into the sea; and in the open space between these ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 479, March 5, 1831 • Various

... his back, bent a little to one side, with his left arm thrown above his head ... the right was turned under his bent body. The sticky slime had sucked in the tips of his feet, shod in tall sailor's boots; the short blue pea-jacket, all impregnated with sea-salt, had not unbuttoned; a red scarf encircled his neck in a hard knot. The swarthy face, turned skyward, seemed to be laughing; ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev

... were cut down, and large panes of glass were substituted for those of more ancient date. The grounds and garden too were reclaimed from the waste of briers and weeds which had so wantonly rioted there; and the waters of the fish- pond, relieved of their dark green slime and decaying leaves, gleamed once more in the summer sunshine like a sheet of burnished silver, while a fairy boat lay moored upon its bosom as in the olden time. Softly the hillside brooklet fell, like a miniature cascade, into the little pond, and the low music it made blended ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes

... which usually keeps or breeds on the land, and is very large and bony, and big, especially the she-frog of that kind: yet these will sometimes come into the water, but it is not often: and the land-frogs are some of them observed by him, to breed by laying eggs; and others to breed of the slime and dust of the earth, and that in winter they turn to slime again, and that the next summer that very slime returns to be a living creature, this is the opinion of Pliny. And Cardanus undertakes to give a reason for the raining of frogs: but if it were in my power, it should rain none but ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton

... of times out of joint than the fact that Mrs. Trollope is a resident in Italy? Yes! she is fixed permanently in Florence, as I am told, pensioned at the rate of two thousand pounds a year to trail her slime over the fruit of Italy. She is here in Rome this winter, and, after having violated the virgin beauty of America, will have for many a year her chance to sully the imperial matron of the civilized world. What must the English public be, if it wishes to pay two thousand ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... felt the black arms of Elspeth rising from the sod—gigantic, mighty. They stole toward her with stealthy hands and claw-like talons. They clutched at her skirts. She froze and could not move. Down, down she slipped toward the black slime of the swamp, and the air about was horror—down, down, till the chilly waters stung her knees; and then with one grip she seized the oak, while the great hand of Elspeth twisted and tore her soul. Faint, afar, nearer and nearer and ever mightier, rose a song of mystic melody. She heard ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois

... eyes of a vivid panorama showing with terrific realism the inevitable depravity that awaited her. Rudely torn from every ideal which she had so weakly endeavored to grasp, she had been, thrown back into the mire and slime at the very moment when her emancipation seemed to be assured. Standing before the tall mirror, with her flashy dress on one arm and her equally exaggerated type of picture hat in the other, she recognized in herself the type of woman depicted by the vulgar street melody, and the full realization ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow

... of the noblest and purest hearts the mud and slime cast up by hurricanes must come. So on that morrow morning, Calyste, who certainly loved his child, quivered with joy on learning that Sabine feared the croup, and was watching for the cause of slight convulsions, ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac

... as we have said, intensely dark, and they each carried a fat, resinous pine torch, which diffused a lurid light around. The stones of the courtyard were slimy from long neglect; and the light, drizzly rain which was falling churned the dust and slime into thin mud. As they drew near the wood pile, Hubert going boldly first, they both fancied a presence—a presence which caused a sickening ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake

... the sliding door and thought herself unobserved, an expression of intense disgust came out upon her expressive face, and with her lace handkerchief she rubbed the hand he had kissed, as if removing the slime of a reptile; and the large mirror at the further end of the room had faithfully reflected the suggestive little pantomime. He saw and ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe

... on which you are standing. Here read Kingsley's well-known story of Hereward; or, The Last of the English, and instead of the rich cornfields you will see that black abyss of mud and bottomless slime into which sank the flower of Norman chivalry as they tried to cross that treacherous bog to conquer the gallant Hereward and to plunder the monastery of Ely, the last stronghold of the English. On they came, thousands upon ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield

... to fight, and the skies were of a darkness seldom known in America. The countryside was no longer smiling. After some two hours of progress we came, in that devastated district near the front, to an expanse where many monsters were clumsily cavorting like dinosaurs in primeval slime. At some distance from the road others stood apparently tethered in line, awaiting their turn for exercise. These were the far-famed tanks. Their commander, or chief mahout—as I was inclined to call him—was a cheerful young giant of colonial origin, who has often driven them serenely across ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... proof regarding this idea of a pre-existence of the soul, still he could not deny it entirely when he said: "The shaping forces which have made our bodies and our minds what they are may always have been psychical forces—from the first living slime-speck to the complex intelligences of to-day." "The old transmigrationist's view would thus possess a share of truth and the actual man would be the resultant not only of intermingling heredities on father's and ...
— Reincarnation • Swami Abhedananda

... by a great patch of vivid scarlet on the ground, and going up to it found it to be a peculiar fungus, branched and corrugated like a foliaceous lichen, but deliquescing into slime at the touch; and then in the shadow of some luxuriant ferns I came upon an unpleasant thing,—the dead body of a rabbit covered with shining flies, but still warm and with the head torn off. I stopped aghast at the sight of ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells

... everywhere in the very bottom of my gulf, covered with mud. Himself also will I involve in sand, pouring vast abundant silt around him; nor shall the Greeks know where to gather his bones, so much slime will I spread over him. And there forthwith shall be[683] his tomb, nor shall there be any want to him of entombing, when the Greeks ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer

... not quick in the present? It will never be a matter of greater ease to enter the path, though we may well have the stimulus of greater despair. For this and that there are times and seasons, but for the highest it is always the hour. The eternal beauty does not pale because its shadow trails over slime and corruption. It is always present beneath the faded mould whereon our lives are spent. Still the old mysterious glimmer from mountain and cave allures, and the golden gleams divide and descend on us from ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell

... again." Willa paused and added deliberately: "Don't try to burrow a passage-way through slime, Vernon. You'll only ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant

... swamp to swamp, seeing nothing but the sickly trunks which grew up out of thinly frozen slime, while no sound made by either bird or beast broke the impressive silence of the primeval solitude. At last, when the day was nearly spent, I crawled toward a larger muskeg, which spread out from a running creek, ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss

... one of the tasks which, as my father grimly said, "We always put off till it rains so hard we can't work out doors." This was no joke to us, for not only did we work out doors, we worked while standing ankle deep in the slime of the yard, getting full benefit of the drizzle. Our new land did not need the fertilizer, but we were forced to haul it away or move the barn. Some folks moved the barn. But then my father ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... not leave to posterity the care of crowning the great poets of the time. Italy, the mother of art, wished the laurel to encircle the brow of the living, not to be simply the ornament of a tomb. Rome had crowned, in 1341, him who, "cleansing the fount of Helicon from slime and marshy rushes, had restored to the water its pristine limpidity, who had opened Castalia's grotto, obstructed by a network of wild boughs, and destroyed the briers in the laurel grove": the illustrious Francis Petrarch.[478] Though somewhat tardy, the ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand

... sea. Our rich cities lie along the Atlantic seaboard close to the water's edge. And to defend these from the cruisers of Great Britain we are to have an army of raw recruits yet to be raised and a navy of gunboats now stranded on the beaches and frigates that have long been rotting in the slime of the Potomac." ...
— Union and Democracy • Allen Johnson

... penetrated into the dark waters. Now they entered the slime; now they stumbled on hidden roots; but deeper and deeper they waded until at last, turning the animal's head with a jerk, and giving him a sharp stroke of the whip, she headed straight for the island. A moment the beast snorted and plunged; higher and higher the black still waters rose ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois

... St. John river to Aukpaque. On the way several rather curious incidents occurred. For example, on one occasion they caught some small fish, which Pote attempted to clean, but the Indians snatched them from him and boiled them "slime and blood and all together." "This," said Pote, "put me in mind of ye old Proverb, God sent meat and ye D——l cooks." On another occasion, he says, "we Incamped by ye side of ye River and we had much difficulty to kindle a fire by Reason it Rained exceeding ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond

... into the drowsy black Enormous watercourse which guides him back To his own tribe again, where he is king; And laughs because he guesses, numbering The yellower poison-wattles on the pouch Of the first lizard wrested from its couch Under the slime (whose skin, the while, he strips To cure his nostril with, and festered lips, And eyeballs bloodshot through the desert-blast) That he has reached its boundary, at last May breathe;—thinks o'er enchantments of the South Sovereign to plague his enemies, their mouth, Eyes, nails, and hair; ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke

... Strength and Violence imaginable, to get away; but the Terebin soon dispatches him, and there leaves him. These they call in Europe the Land Tortois; their Food is Snails, Tad-pools, or young Frogs, Mushrooms, and the Dew and Slime of ...
— A New Voyage to Carolina • John Lawson

... refrained, not so much because of the danger that they might be pieced together again, as that they might attract the attention of anybody who chanced to be about at the time. After a while, however, they found a deep crack between the cell wall and the floor, partly concealed by slime and dirt; and into this crack they pushed the remnants of the cryptogram, and then hid the small aperture again by covering it with more dirt scraped from the cell floor. Thus hidden it was exceedingly unlikely that anybody ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood

... infantryman who suffers most, for he has to live, eat, sleep, and work in the mud. The plain of dragging slime that stretches from Switzerland to the sea is far worse to face than the fire of machine guns or the great black trench-mortar bombs that come twisting down through the air. It is more terrible than the frost and the rain—you cannot even ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett

... such a cruel insight? It was as if a tideless sea, by some horrible miracle, retreated, leaving naked rocks which till that moment had never been seen by mortal eyes, hideous and grotesque rocks covered with slime and ooze. ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens

... happened. Like himself, Master Potts had incautiously approached the swamp, and, getting entangled in it, was thrown, head foremost, into the slough; out of which he was now floundering, covered from head to foot with inky-coloured slime. As soon as they were aware of the accident, the two grooms pushed forward, and one of them galloped after Flint, whom he succeeded at last in catching; while the other, with difficulty preserving his countenance at the woful plight of the attorney, who looked as black as a negro, ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth

... Roach, Dace, Loach, Minnow, Smelt, small Trout, or Pearch, cutting off the Finns on the back, or small Eels well scoured in Wheat-Bran, which will keep them better and longer, taking a way the slime and watery substance, that causes them to rot or ...
— The School of Recreation (1696 edition) • Robert Howlett

... his art! The knot-grass fettered there the hand Which once could burst an iron band; Beneath the broad and ample bone, That bucklered heart to fear unknown, A feeble and a timorous guest, The fieldfare framed her lowly nest; There the slow blindworm left his slime On the fleet limbs that mocked at time; And there, too, lay the leader's skull Still wreathed with chaplet, flushed and full, For heath-bell with her purple bloom Supplied the bonnet and the plume. All night, in this sad glen the maid Sat shrouded in her mantle's shade: She said no shepherd ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott

... said, 'why is it? You seem to long for me. You seem to stretch out hands to me, as if you would say, "Sleep here!" We belong to one another, I suppose. This flesh and bone, this breathing, thinking apparatus, grew out of the slime of you, old world, and will go back to your dust and flourish in grass and flower, and float in cloud and fall in rain. You have hidden in your green breast all the millions who have gone before me. Fecund mother! ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray

... now concluded; and in reviewing them in the mass, we can only exclaim—this, then, is the pass to which the poetry of England has come! This is the life into which the slime of the Keateses and Shelleys of former times has fecundated! The result was predicted about a quarter of a century ago in the pages of this Magazine; and many attempts were then made to suppress the nuisance at its fountainhead. Much good was accomplished: but our efforts at that ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various

... for the Day, you schemed for the Day; Watch how the Day will go. Slayer of age and youth and prime (Defenseless slain for never a crime) Thou art steeped in blood as a hog in slime, False friend ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... the intervals between which were covered with a crust of brimstone. I attempted to reach one of the ponds, but had not gone far when the point of my pole went through the crust, and up bubbled a quantity of black slime. On touching it, and finding it scalding hot, I shouted to my companions, who were behind, not to venture on the treacherous ground. A horror seized me, and every instant I feared that I should break through the surface. Should that take place, what a dreadful fate would be mine! I hastened ...
— In the Rocky Mountains - A Tale of Adventure • W. H. G. Kingston

... clear. I beheld a bright and starry shape, that seemed as a spirit, yet wore thine aspect, standing on a rock; and an angry torrent rolled between the rock and the dry safe land. The waves began to invade the rock, and the spirit unfurled its wings as to flee. And then foul things climbed up from the slime of the rock, and descended from the mists of the troubled skies, and they coiled round the wings and ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... thoroughly as possible. Certainly he did appear to do so; and when at length he drew back, rocking and gasping like a drunken creature, the famed purity of that herring-gull's uniform was a thing of beauty no longer. That part of him, indeed, which was not red was mud, or sand, or green slime, and in his eyes was the most worried and tired look you ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars

... enraptures the ear. Others of us feel a need for its wisdom and insight—and wings. It deepens our everyday moods. It reminds us of Wonder. Here we are, with our great hearts and brains, descended from blind bits of slime, erecting a busy civilization on a beautiful earth; and that earth is whirling through space, amid great golden worlds: and yet, being grandsons of slime, we ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.

... blazer, plunged, grabbed at some live man, grappled him, was dragged under. He came up again further along stream, swam choking to the bank, clung to the grasses. He whimpered as he sought foot-hold in the slime. It was ill to be down in that ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm

... down the narrow valley to Oberammergau. The road ahead was now in shadow, but behind me the mountain mass was dazzling white in the rays of the setting sun. "What a pity," I thought, "that the peasant must depart from these beautiful mountains and valleys to die in the slime of the trenches." ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin

... in head first. For an instant he lay motionless in the slime, but soon he poked up his head, shook the water from his eyes and sniffed. Then he swam, ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof

... king of Zeboiim; and the king of Bela, the city that devours its inhabitants. The five were routed in the fruitful Vale of Siddim, the canals of which later formed the Dead Sea. They that remained of the rank and file fled to the mountains, but the kings fell into the slime pits and stuck there. Only the king of Sodom was rescued, miraculously, for the purpose that he might convert those heathen to faith in God that had not believed in the wonderful deliverance of Abraham from the ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg

... power sets upon my brow this crown of naked mockery. Yet in thy breath, the swift essence that brought me light, that brought me gloom, thou didst vow to me that I who cannot die should once more pluck the lost flower of my immortal loveliness from this foul slime of shame. ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard

... of all this, deafness, blindness, a black vault, the inside of a tomb already prepared, death in the mire beneath a cover! slow suffocation by filth, a stone box where asphyxia opens its claw in the mire and clutches you by the throat; fetidness mingled with the death-rattle; slime instead of the strand, sulfuretted hydrogen in place of the hurricane, dung in place of the ocean! And to shout, to gnash one's teeth, and to writhe, and to struggle, and to agonize, with that enormous city which knows nothing of it all, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... to your memory also those two inseparables—linked together, it would seem, because they were so unlike. The one, gentle, dreamy, and romantic, was to be the genius of the set; but alas, he "took to bad habits," and oozed into the slime of life, imperceptibly almost, hurting no creature but himself—unless it may be that to some parent or other near of kin his gentle facility may have caused keener pangs than others give by cruelty and tyranny. The other, bright-eyed, healthy, ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton

... daybreak; for the tide served in the early morning and only at its height could the launch approach the shore, which at low water was bordered with the filthy slime ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly

... would, far more, that the piteous thing had never been done in England! Flying men, flung back from dreams of victory and honour, only glad to have the luck of life and limbs to fly with, mud-bedraggled, foul with slime, reeking both with sweat and blood, which they could not stop to wipe, cursing, with their pumped-out lungs, every stick that hindered them, or gory puddle that slipped the step, scarcely able to leap over the corses that had dragged ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore

... then, making their way through the slime and silt of the drift flooring, slippery and wet from years of flooding. From above them the water dripped from the seep-soaked hanging-wall, which showed rough and splotchy in the gleam of the carbides and seemed to absorb the light until they could see only ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper

... climbin' over this windfall while A carry this little puss on m' shoulder? Steer for the snow ahead! Don't mind my laggin' back! Go on ahead an' wait for us! A'm goin' t' see if A can't mine down to some gold beneath th' slime o' th' slums! It's not in the course o' nature that any child should be blind t' this world, Miss Eleanor, if A can open th' doors for her! Go ahead; an' if y' find a good sittin' down place, just rest quiet an' wait for us an' ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut

... stately brig or shapely schooner; but it gathers nowhere into the forest of masts and chimneys that fringe the North River and East River. The foul tide rises and falls between low shores where, when it ebbs, are seen oozy shoals of slime, and every keel or paddle that stirs the surface of the river brings up ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells

... come forth from slime and mud,—fetid and crawling, unformed and monstrous. I grant exceptions; and even in the New School, as it is called, I can admire the real genius, the vital and creative power of Victor Hugo. But oh, that a nation which has known a Corneille should ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VI • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... flowing river will make a tremendous delta at the mouth of it in the course of years. And however small may have been the amount of evil and deflection from God's law in that flowing river of my past life, what a filthy, foul bank of slime must be piled up down ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... by this Cross I wear, I heard that "floater" say: "I am the man from whom you ran, the man you sought to slay. That you may note and gaze and gloat, and say 'Revenge is sweet', In the grit and grime of the river's slime I ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service

... close beside the boy without, however, offering to touch the motionless figure, was a massive savage beast, apparently a man-eater; and it was all the same to me whether it had sprung aboard off the banks of an Indian river, or trotted across this breast of English slime out ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell

... margin of the pool; she jerked out the semi-circular comb which held back Marian's cloud of dusky hair, and let the thick locks fall in disorder about her head and face; she dragged the little sun bonnet in the green slime at the margin of the pool, and, on pretence of tying it on the child's head, wrenched off one of the strings, which she heedlessly left lying on ...
— The Golden Shoemaker - or 'Cobbler' Horn • J. W. Keyworth

... all perfectly consistent," Gorham assured him on more than one occasion. "It is often necessary to walk through filth and slime in order to reach high ground. It is a serious fault in our business system that these crimes can be committed, but the Consolidated Companies is not responsible for the system. To accomplish its own high ends, the Companies must possess itself of certain properties. These properties are at present ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt

... difficulties of the task he had set himself became almost insurmountable; yet sustained as he was by his imperative need, he tore his way through the labyrinth of trailing vines, or floundered across acre-wide patches of green slime and black mud, which at each step threatened to engulf him in their treacherous depths, until at the end of an hour he gained the southern side of the clearing and a firmer footing within the shelter of ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester

... sunlight causes too rapid growth of green slime, hence the aquarium should not be set in a window. Close to a window through which the sun shines upon it for an hour or longer each day ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education

... is man? By filthy lust possessed, Whirled in a round of lies, Fond frenzy swells his breast. The pure man sinks in mire and slime, The noble shrinketh not from crime, Wilt thou resent on him the charms of sin? Like fading grass, So shall he pass. Like chaff that blows Where the wind goes. Then spare him, be thou merciful, O King, Upon ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus

... her rivers to snare us, She set her snows to chill, Her clouds had the cunning of vultures, Her plants were charged to kill. The glooms of her forests benumbed us, On the slime of her ledges we sprawled; But we set our feet to the northward, And crawled and crawled and crawled! We defied her, and cursed her, and shouted: "To hell with your rain and your snow. Our minds we have set on a journey, And despite of your anger ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland

... were a kingdom's trust, In dim Atlantic forests' fold, The marble wasteth to a crust, The granite crumbles into mould; O'er these—left nameless from of old - As over Shinar's brick and slime, One vast forgetfulness is roll'd - Where are ...
— Ballads in Blue China and Verses and Translations • Andrew Lang

... land! O dear long-suffering land, Slay thou the serpent ere he slime the core! Take thou our houses and amenities, Take thou the hand that parting clings to ours, And going bears our heart into the fight; Take thou, but slay the serpent ere ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... Worse; I had exposed her to humiliation at the hands of that unworthy animal who soiled her in thought with the slime of his suspicions. Through me she had been put to the shameful need of listening at a door, and had been subjected to the ignominy of being so discovered. Through me she ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini

... as to leave sufficient slope for tailings' dumps. This is more important when treating ore of such value that the tailings are worth saving for secondary treatment. In this case provision should be made for tailings, dams, or slime pits. ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson

... Climate, what Historians say of the Earth, that it sweated out a Bitumen or natural kind of Mortar, which is doubtless the same with that mentioned in Holy Writ, as contributing to the Structure of Babel. Slime they ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... black sow, she can root in de mud, She can tumble an' roll in de slime; But dat big red cow, she git all mired up, So dat cow need ...
— Negro Folk Rhymes - Wise and Otherwise: With a Study • Thomas W. Talley

... live. With exclamations of wonder they sometimes said: "What fortunate people we are to have heard such words!" Four men and five women were born again. Ensenada, built on a malarial swamp, was reeking with miasma, and the houses were raised on posts about a yard above the slime. I was in consequence stricken with malarial fever. One day a man who had attended the meetings came into my room, and, kneeling down, asked the Lord not to let me suffer, but to take me quickly. After long weeks ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray

... hear'st thou the least part? 'Tis the chronicle of art. To the open ear it sings Sweet the genesis of things, Of tendency through endless ages, Of star-dust, and star-pilgrimages, Of rounded worlds, of space and time, Of the old flood's subsiding slime, Of chemic matter, force and form, Of poles and powers, cold, wet, and warm: The rushing metamorphosis Dissolving all that fixture is, Melts things that be to things that seem, And solid nature to a dream. O, listen to the undersong, The ever old, the ever young; ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... seemed to Hobb rather deep, and he was wondering whether his old cap were worth wading for, and had almost decided to abandon it, when he saw a skinny yellow arm, like a frog's leg, stretch up through the water, and a hand that dripped with slime grope for his cap. With three strides he was in the pond, and he caught the cap and the hand together in his fist. The hand writhed in his, but Hobb was too strong for it; and with a mighty tug he dragged first the shoulder and then the head belonging to the hand ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon

... so now; but the man always becomes the master. If you grovelled in the earth for diamonds, she would have to look for them amidst the mud and slime." ...
— An Old Man's Love • Anthony Trollope

... you cannot get back to the main river. Of course if you really want a truly safe investment in Fame, and really care about Posterity, and Posterity's Science, you will jump over into the black batter-like, stinking slime, cheered by the thought of the terrific sensation you will produce 20,000 years hence, and the care you will be taken of then by your fellow-creatures, in a museum. But if you are a mere ordinary person of a retiring nature, like me, ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley

... But why go on? Why repeat more of his audacious and exasperating falsehoods? Let us close fittingly with this one: he affirms that "in the mosque of St. Sophia at Constantinople I got my feet so stuck up with a complication of gums, slime, and general impurity, that I wore out more than two thousand pair of bootjacks getting my boots off that night, and even then some Christian hide peeled off with them." It is monstrous. Such statements are simply lies—there is no other name for ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... notion of repairing a gun. So we, carrying a gunsmith on board, bought up at one place the guns that wanted repairs, and sold them at the next for new pieces. In this way we came to our destination, which was the mouth of a river full of slime and mosquitoes, and called the Popo River. There a whole tribe of niggers put ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)

... She won't let me speak about it. She's funnier than ever. She treats me as if I were some obscene monster just crawled up out of the primeval slime." ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair

... lightlessness beset That might have oppressed the dragons of old time Crunching and groping in the abysmal slime, A cave of cut-throat thoughts and villainous dreams, Hag-rid and crying with cold and dirt and wet, The afflicted City, prone from mark to mark In shameful occultation, seems A nightmare labyrinthine, dim and drifting, With wavering gulfs and antic heights, and shifting, Rent ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley

... came, and in the channel held his shield betwixt the Modern and the fountain, so that he drew up nothing but mud. For, although no fountain on earth can compare with the clearness of Helicon, yet there lies at bottom a thick sediment of slime and mud; for so Apollo begged of Jupiter, as a punishment to those who durst attempt to taste it with unhallowed lips, and for a lesson to all not to draw too deep ...
— The Battle of the Books - and Other Short Pieces • Jonathan Swift

... to nothing, for until the water had passed away nothing could be done, save splash here and there, looking at the fruit-trees bestrewed with moss and muddy reeds and grass, while Morgan uttered groan after groan, as he at last saw the bushes and the tops of his vegetables appear covered with slime. ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn

... yet all together wrought, Unconscious, not unworthy instruments, By which a hand invisible was rearing A new creation in the secret deep. .....I saw the living pile ascend, The mausoleum of its architects, Still dying upwards as their labors closed; Slime the material, but the slime was turned To adamant by their petrific touch: Frail were their frames, ephemeral their lives, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various

... filmiest dreams, like the sound of thunder in a blossoming orchard). The echoes are in us of great voices long gone hence, the unknown cries of huge beasts on the mountains; the sullen aims of creatures in the slime; the love-call of the bittern. We know, too, echoes of things outside our ken—the thought that shapes itself in the bee's brain and becomes a waxen box of sweets; the tyranny of youth stirring in the womb; the crazy terror of small slaughtered ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb

... to purity, that impurity worships it the more as itself sinks lower in the slime of things. It is the poignancy of the meteorite, which, falling from a star, hisses out ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore

... death: and beyond these links of community, which in themselves made the most poignant part of his distress, he thought of Hyde, for all his energy of life, as of something not only hellish but inorganic. This was the shocking thing; that the slime of the pit seemed to utter cries and voices; that the amorphous dust gesticulated and sinned; that what was dead, and had no shape, should usurp the offices of life. And this again, that that insurgent horror was knit to him closer ...
— Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde • ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

... At last I came to a turning into a path several degrees worse in quality than the "boreen," and concluded that, as it was nearly impassable, it must lead to the home of the Irreconcilable. As a change it was pleasant to step from deep slippery mud and slime on to stones placed with their acutest angles upwards, but a final encounter with these landed me literally at ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker

... pang? To thee, her tenderling, She gave lust-fang To run the jungle's harm; Now strives thee to disarm, And fend Life from that weapon lent thy wear Till thou, forsaking dust, mightst capture her. What need now of the blood Whose wasteful plenitude Swept thee through hostile slime To shores of light and time, Man-minim safe mid frost and poison dews Where naught could live that had not life ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan

... chamber below, having a new frame made proper for it to stand on. By and by comes Dr. Burnett, who assures me that I have an ulcer either in the kidneys or bladder, for my water, which he saw yesterday, he is sure the sediment is not slime gathered by heat, but is a direct pusse. He did write me down some direction what to do for it, but not with ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys

... ever see an eel—pot, with the water drawn off, when the snake—like fish were twining, and twisting, and crawling, like Brobdignag maggots, in living knots, a horrible and disgusting mass of living abomination, amidst the filthy slime ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott

... blazing though the sun was. These mangrove swamps are evil-looking places. The mangrove, the only tree, I believe, that actually grows in salt water, has unnaturally green leaves. The trees grow on things like stilts, digging their roots deep into the foul slime. When the tide is out, these stilts stand grey and naked below the canopy of vivid greenery, and amongst them obscene, crab-like things crawl over the festering black ooze. The water in the labyrinth of channels between the mangroves was thick and discoloured; there was ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton

... quality and quintessence of love, no one can regard it anywhere, or at any time, as out of place. "Prize-lawful or prize-lawless" it is ever a flower, even though it grow, like the love of the hero of Turf and Towers, in slime. Lust, fleshly desire, which has been too often miscalled love, is its worst perversion. Love spends itself for another, and seeks satisfaction only in another's good. But last uses up others for its own worst purposes, wastes its object, and turns the current of life back inwards, into the ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones

... from the swamp, for we are again approaching one of those cursed swamps, and can hear the music of the alligators and bullfrogs. There they are, the beauties; a couple of them are taking a peep at us, sticking their elegant heads and long delicate snouts out of the slime and mud. The neighbourhood is none of the best; but luckily the path is firm and good, carefully made, evidently by Indian hands. None but Indians could live and labour and travel habitually, in such a pestilential atmosphere. Thank God! we are out of it at last. Again ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various

... the sun at the proper angle there appeared, as far as the irregularity of the coast line permitted, a shining band, broken only where the face of the rock was uneven and detached—a zone of gold bestowed upon the island by the amorous sea. But on the beach the slime which transformed the grey and brown rocks was nothing but an inconsistent, dirty, grey-green, crisp, ill-smelling streak, that haply vanished in a couple of days. As I see less of the weather side than I do of the beach, I argue to myself that it is nearer perfection to be minus a streak ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield

... tracks from the rolling plain Through slime-green sloughs to a sedgy ravine, Where the cat-tail spikes of the marsh-grown flags Stand half as high ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut

... from the mean and dingy pomposity of English Victorian statuary. Perhaps the most hideous and depressing object in the universe—far more hideous and depressing than one of Mr. H.G. Wells's shapeless monsters of the slime (and not at all unlike them)—is the statue of an English philanthropist. Almost as bad, though, of course, not quite as bad, are the statues of English politicians in Parliament Fields. Each of them is cased in a cylindrical frock-coat, and each carries either a scroll or a dubious-looking garment ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton

... surface of the latter is thoroughly cleaned by scrubbing and flushing. The secret of securing a good bond between fresh concrete and concrete that has set lies largely in getting rid of the glaze skin and the slime and dust which forms on it. Washing will go far toward doing this. The glaze skin can be removed entirely by acid solutions, but the acid wash must be flushed free from the surface before placing ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette

... and the place of punishment, what first drew our wonder was the character of the whole. The very ground stood thick with a crop of knife- blades and pointed stakes; and it was ringed round with rivers, one of slime, a second of blood, and the innermost of flame. This last was very broad and quite impassable; the flame flowed like water, swelled like the sea, and teemed with fish, some resembling firebrands, and others, the small ones, live coals; these ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata

... trigger, trying to patter a prayer; Going outside with an escort, raving with lips all afoam; Writing a cheque for a million, drivelling feebly of home; Lost like a louse in the burning ... or else in tented town Seeking a drunkard's solace, sinking and sinking down; Steeped in the slime at the bottom, dead to a decent world, Lost 'mid the human flotsam, far on the frontier hurled; In the camp at the bend of the river, with its dozen saloons aglare, Its gambling dens a-riot, its gramophones all a-blare; Crimped with the crimes of a city, ...
— Songs of a Sourdough • Robert W. Service

... Beltane, weighted in his heavy mail—down and ever down through a world of green that grew dark and ever more dark, until, within the pitchy gloom beneath him was a quaking slime that sucked viciously at foot and ankle. Desperately he fought and strove to rise, but ever the mud clung, and, lusty swimmer though he was, his ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol

... pulled out one foot, and was shocked to find that she had left her shoe behind in the black slime; she was conscious, too, that her other foot was sinking deeper and deeper in the treacherous marsh. There was nothing to hold by, there was not even an osier near at hand; behind the gentian rose a thicket of rosy-blossomed willow-herb, and here and there ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various

... man, dripping from head to foot with the golden slime, rushed up and tugged excitedly at Jim's arm. "Come on an' help me to ketch them horses! What'd I bring you along for? Let the girl be, I don't ker if her neck's broke! I got to lodge a complaint against them rascals, ...
— Anything Once • Douglas Grant

... heavy. Gordon had to pick his way through the mossy swamp, leading the pack-horse by the bridle. Sometimes he was ankle-deep in water of a greenish slime. Again he had to drag the animal from the bog to a hummock of grass which gave a spongy footing. This would end in another quagmire of peat through which they must plough with the mud sucking at their feet. It was hard, ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine

... tender sons; Then him, who armed to their rescue runs, They seized, and with entangling folds embraced, 210 His neck twice compassing, and twice his waist: Their pois'nous knots he strives to break and tear, While slime and blood his sacred wreaths besmear; Then loudly roars, as when th'enraged bull From th'altar flies, and from his wounded skull Shakes the huge axe; the conqu'ring serpents fly To cruel Pallas' altar, and there lie Under her feet, within her shield's extent. 218 We, in our fears, ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham

... only wife and children and home and all outward decency, but every characteristic of truth and honesty and manhood of his own soul. A man, who through self-indulgence and the incessant yielding to unspeakable desires, had become little better than a human sewer, through whom the slime and indescribable filth of fallen and degraded humanity found its unhindered course. A human being, who had become a lazar spot, a walking pest, whose inmost thought rotted and putrified his own mind; and whose words without ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman

... there a glory laid up for them that will have God, the I of their I, to throne it in the temple he has built, to pervade the life he has lifed out of himself. My soul is now as a chaos with a hungry heart of order buried beneath its slime, that longs and longs for the moving of the breath of God ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald

... down by his recollections, he travelled through many countries and arrived at a river which was dangerous, because of its violence and the slime that covered its shores. Since a long time nobody had ventured to ...
— Three short works - The Dance of Death, The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitaller, A Simple Soul. • Gustave Flaubert

... with the waters, there shall be A cry of nations o'er thy sunken halls, A loud lament along the sweeping sea! If I, a northern wanderer, weep for thee, What should thy sons do?—anything but weep: And yet they only murmur in their sleep. In contrast with their fathers—as the slime, The dull green ooze of the receding deep, Is with the dashing of the spring-tide foam That drives the sailor shipless to his home, Are they to those that were; and thus they creep, Crouching and crab-like, through their sapping streets. O agony! that centuries should reap No mellower harvest! ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various

... Huntsman Peckham's horn. Others might lose the scent of what it was all about in the tropical jungle of an indictment eleven pages long, but not he. Like the old dog in Masefield's "Reynard the Fox," Mr. Magnus would work through ditches full of legal slime, nose through thorn thickets of confusion, dash through copses and spinneys of words and phrases, until he snapped close at the heels of intelligibility. The Honorable Peckham couldn't have drawn an indictment to save his legal life. Neither could any of the rest. Neither ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train

... in this early stage of it, just look a bit at the home itself. It has been pretty badly mussed, soiled and hurt by sin's foul touch. Yet even so it is a wonder of a world in its beauty and fruitfulness. What must it have been before the slime and tangle of sin got in! But that's a whole story by itself. We must not stop there ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon

... Bernat!"; the men, with their sleeves and trousers rolled up, or even entirely naked save for the sash that is never removed from the skin of a Valencian peasant; the women, with their skirts raised over their heads for protection, sinking their tanned, skinny, over-worked legs into the slime, and all drenched from head to foot, the wet clothes sticking to their bodies; and at the head, a number of strong young men with four-wicked tapers lighted, sputtering and crackling in the rain and casting a weird flickering radiance back ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... meets night it is all goblin country. To westward; the last of the spent day—rust-red and pearl, illimitable levels of shore waiting for the tide to turn again. To eastward, black night among the valleys, and on the rounded hill slopes a hard glaze that is not so much light as snail-slime from the moon. Once or twice perhaps in the winter the Northern Lights come out between the moon and the sun, so that to the two unearthly lights is added the leap and flare ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling

... as of primordial slime subtly intruded upon the sensory nerves of the visitor. The place breathed out decay; the decay of humanity, of cleanliness, of the honest decencies of life turned foul. Something lethal exhaled from that dim doorway. There was a stab of pestilence, reaching for ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... back. At every few yards he would sink down almost to his knees in the black mud, but wrenching himself free would flounder forward. Then, still some distance from the river, he fell upon his face, and did not rise again. I saw his arms beating feebler and feebler as he sank till at last the oily slime closed over him, and I could detect nothing but a faint heaving underneath the mud. And after a ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome

... chokes the infant throat with slime, He sets the ferment free; He builds the tiny tube of lime That blocks ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro

... outlet, a narrow, miry stream which loses itself in a swamp, and that in turn merges into the Upper Wild Rice Lake. We paddled and poled down to the end of the little river, and came to a dead stand in the matted roots of the swamp-grass: then waded waist-deep in the mire and slime, each dragging his canoe with the aid of an Indian, until we came out upon the open water. Thence a paddle of two miles along the coast brought us to another little stream flowing into the lake. As we came ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various

... foot of the slippery waterstairs, green with slime, McKay, grasping the worn rail, lifted his head and looked up into the faces of the waiting crowd. And saw the face of her he was looking ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers

... feeling that Reynolds' letter surely awaited him made his heart glow. It was impossible that he should actually be without a cent of money, and the thought filled his brain with an irrational exaltation which made him forget the slime in which his feet slipped. He planned to start on the limited train. "I'll go as far from this cursed hole of a city as I can," he said; "I'll get out where men don't eat each other to keep alive. He'll certainly send me twenty dollars. The silver on the bridle is worth that alone. Mebbe he'll ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland

... are so astonishing, and which, as they are for purity far more excellent than our earth, so they are the seats of intelligences, far more pure and perfect than those which inhabit these lower regions." He proceeds to remark, that animals, worthy of the greatest admiration, are produced out of the slime and mud of ponds and ditches, and even in putrefying vegetables, which, as they indicate the miraculous properties of their author, also show us in what estimation we should hold the higher orders of ...
— North American Medical and Surgical Journal, Vol. 2, No. 3, July, 1826 • Various

... slow down as he saw his pointer above the drum indicate the approach of the six-hundred-foot level. They stepped out cautiously, whiffed the air, and knew that the pipes, which had been protected by the water, were intact, and that they had no need to fear foul air. The rusted rails, slime-covered, beneath their rubber boots, glowed a vivid red as they inspected the timbering above, and saw that the sparse stulls, caps, and columns were still holding their own, and that the heavy porphyritic formation ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton

... flashed out from the mud a few paces away was the head of a gigantic anaconda that had hidden itself in the slime and was waiting for cow or bull to come within reach. The instant the king of the herd did so, the head shot from its concealment and the teeth were snapped together in the cartilage of the animal's nose. Then the serpent began drawing its victim forward with terrific ...
— Up the Forked River - Or, Adventures in South America • Edward Sylvester Ellis

... needed to burnish and bring into bloom the tertiary and dubious colours; the colour of peat, pea-soup, Impressionist sketches, brown velvet coats, olives, grey and blue slates, the complexions of vegetarians, the tints of volcanic rock, chocolate, cocoa, mud, soot, slime, old boots; the delicate shades of these do need the sunlight to bring out the faint beauty that often clings to them. But if you have a healthy negro taste in colour, if you choke your garden with poppies and geraniums, if you paint your house sky-blue ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton

... creatures. The patches spread and merged with lightning rapidity until a solid sheet of livid purple covered the writhing mass. Swiftly that mass lost both movement and shape as it melted down into a pool of turgid purple slime. Then the slime vaporized into purple mists that blended into the surrounding vapors, and all trace of the ape-things and their jelly nucleus ...
— Zehru of Xollar • Hal K. Wells

... in "Silliman's American Journal," vol. vii., shows its components to have been but imperfectly represented in the above German analysis. He found in tobacco by chemical examination—1, gum; 2, a viscid slime, equally soluble in water and alcohol, and precipitable from both by subacetate of lead; 3, tannin; 4, gallic acid; 5, chlorophyle (leaf green); 6, a green pulverulent matter, which dissolves in boiling water, but falls down again when the water cools; 7, a yellow oil, possessing the ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds

... shall I praise or curse to thy desert? Or separate thy sound from thy corrupted part? 170 I call thee Nile; the parallel will stand; Thy tides of wealth o'erflow the fatten'd land; Yet monsters from thy large increase we find, Engender'd on the slime thou leav'st behind. Sedition has not wholly seized on thee, Thy nobler parts are from infection free. Of Israel's tribes thou hast a numerous band, But still the Canaanite is in the land. Thy military ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden

... the surface of the ground, with mud And slime besmeared (the refuse of the flood), Received the rays of heaven, and sucking in The seeds of heat, new creatures did begin. Some were of several sorts produced before; But, of new monsters, earth created more. Unwillingly, but yet she brought to light Thee, Python, too, the wondering world ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson

... a sob in the throat. To Rachel, also, sunk in her own terrors, it was almost unbearable. The pure unspoilt passion of it—the careless, confident joy—seemed to make an outcast of her, as she sat there in the dark, dragged back by the shock and horror of Delane's appearance into the slime and slough of old memories, and struggling with them in vain. Yes, she was "damaged goods"—she was unfit to marry George Ellesborough. But she would marry him! She set her teeth—clinging to him with all the energy of a woman's deepening and maturing consciousness. She had ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward



Words linked to "Slime" :   slime mold, begrime, guck, plasmodial slime mold, sapropel, goop, slime eels, bemire, slime mould, goo, gunk, grime, gook, acellular slime mold, soil, white slime mushroom, slime mushroom, matter, slimy, cellular slime mold, sludge, Fischer's slime mushroom, ooze, muck, dirty, true slime mold, slime bacteria



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