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Swamp   /swɑmp/  /swɔmp/   Listen
Swamp

noun
1.
Low land that is seasonally flooded; has more woody plants than a marsh and better drainage than a bog.  Synonym: swampland.
2.
A situation fraught with difficulties and imponderables.



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"Swamp" Quotes from Famous Books



... on the summit of the Kaibab Plateau. Dutton Point, the great salient promontory of Powell Plateau, seen so clearly from Bass Camp on the south rim, is close before me, and views and vistas in every direction are glorious and sublime. We ride on to Swamp Point. The views are magnificent, but who shall attempt to describe them? We soon enter a pine forest. Tall pine trees and Douglas spruces are the principal trees, with many beautiful groups of white aspen. Rich grass and wild oats and great quantities of beautiful flowers. We ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James

... at this place which the horse can see, but which the rider fails to detect. They are in the midst of a swamp where one false step would mean a horrible death in the quagmire on the verge of which the horse has pulled up. The man uses whip and spur, but the horse refuses to move. Finally the rider leaves the horse to ...
— A Horse Book • Mary Tourtel

... point," bellowed the skipper. Harriet instantly obeyed the command. Then the gale was upon them with a screech and a roar. A volume of water that threatened to swamp them rolled toward the stern, but before it had done so Harriet, acting upon a sharply uttered command, had swung the sloop about until its nose met the oncoming rush of wind and water. She gasped ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls by the Sea - Or The Loss of The Lonesome Bar • Janet Aldridge

... trickles into the Warsaw whins and is lost. C.P., arrived at edge of Pripet Marshes, drops another ball, tops it into hazard, throws bag of clubs after it, and sends for another set. Hole abandoned, M. having taken thirty-nine shots and a life-line to get out of the Blokhod Swamp. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, June 27, 1917 - 1917 Almanack • Various

... turned our attention to the scenery. Behind us a motorcycle was chugging along with a noise all out of proportion to the size of the vehicle, and we amused ourselves by wondering what would happen if it should try to pass us on the narrow road, with a sharp drop into a small lake on one side and a swamp on the other. But the rider evidently had more caution than we generally credit to motorcyclists and made no attempt to pass us, so we were not treated to the spectacle of a man and a motorcycle turning a somersault into the lake or sprawling in ...
— The Campfire Girls Go Motoring • Hildegard G. Frey

... reader with my experiences after arriving at New York. I could not have felt worse had I been driven into the Dismal Swamp. My apartments were dusty and stifling, and ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe

... an item from some place in Florida. It says that two girls went out in a motor boat, to gather specimens of rare swamp flowers, and have not been heard of since. It is feared they may have been upset and drowned, or that alligators ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Under the Palms - Or Lost in the Wilds of Florida • Laura Lee Hope

... were going to the neighborhood of Eagle and Chamberlain Lakes, or the head-waters of the St. John, and offered to keep us company as far as we went. The lake to-day was rougher than I found the ocean, either going or returning, and Joe remarked that it would swamp his birch. Off Lily Bay it is a dozen miles wide, but it is much broken by islands. The scenery is not merely wild, but varied and interesting; mountains were seen, farther or nearer, on all sides but the north-west, their summits now lost in the clouds; but ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various

... of abundant cattle; and the vales, which had teemed with reapers rejoicing in the harvest, were now laid waste and silent. The plain presented one wide flat of desolation. Where once was the enameled meadow, a dreary swamp extended its vapory surface; and the road which a happy peasantry no longer trod, lay choked up with thistles and rank grass; while birds and animals of chase would spring from its thickets, on the lonely traveler, to tell him by their ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter

... coinciding with that of the starlings. This year (1916) both birds were noticed just after the scene-shifter had swept the hills of mists, and now other birds seem to have awakened to the conditions which the starlings and the nutmegs brought with them from hotter lands. The swamp pheasants are whooping and gurgling, and that semi-migratory fellow, the spangled drongo—a flattering name, for he jangles but does not spangle—sits on the slim branch of the Moreton Bay ash which held last year's ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield

... with great difficulty succeeded in rescuing his mother from prison. In getting out the poor woman broke her leg, but her son lifted her on to his horse and carried her away to a swamp near by. Here he built her a hut and brought her food and kept her safe until all ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall

... out—three men, two toboggans, and seven dogs; four on the larger vehicle and three on the smaller, one of the dogs brought by our guide. Three miles from Fort Yukon we crossed the Porcupine River and then plunged into the wilderness of lake and swamp and forest that stretches north of the Yukon. A portage trail, as such a track across country is called to distinguish it from a river trail, has the advantage of such protection from storm as its timbered stretches afford. For miles and miles the route passes through scrub spruce that has been ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck

... to drive the keen-fanged snake From its old home in swamp or brake Irks sensitive humanity; But they who know the untamed thing, Have felt its fang, have seen its spring, Hold mercy ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 6, 1890 • Various

... a dark brown or black swamp soil consisting of large amounts of humus or decaying organic matter mixed with some fine sand and clay. It is found in ...
— The First Book of Farming • Charles L. Goodrich

... the delight of that march through the open pine barren, with occasional patches of uncertain swamp. The Eighth Maine, under Lieutenant-Colonel Twichell, was on the right, the Sixth Connecticut, under Major Meeker, on the left, and my own men, under Major Strong, in the centre, having in charge the cannon, to which they had been trained. Mr. Heron, from the ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... enforced! If he is fool enough to alter his name, and throw up all his certificates what is to become of him? He will get no practice in any civilized place, and will have to betake himself to some pestilential swamp, will slave his sisters to death, spend their money, and destroy them with ague. How can you sit ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge

... interests could only lie with the Allies, who were beginning to export Chinese man-power as an auxiliary war-aid and who were very anxious to place the whole matter on a sounder footing. Little real progress was, however, made in the face of the renewed German efforts to swamp the country with their propaganda. By means of war-maps, printed in English and Chinese, and also by means of an exhaustive daily telegraphic service which hammered home every possible fact illustrative of German invincibility, the German position ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale

... more, for I ran five miles before I stopped, and at last lay down in a little swamp near the seashore to which my mother had once taken me. My back was burning like fire, and I tried to cool it ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard

... one er de niggers on de nex' plantation, one er ole Mars Henry Brayboy's niggers, had runned away de day befo', en tuk ter de swamp, en ole Mars Dugal' en some er de yuther nabor w'ite folks had gone out wid dere guns en dere dogs fer ter he'p 'em hunt fer de nigger; en de han's on our own plantation wuz all so flusterated dat we fuhgot ter tell de noo han' 'bout de goopher ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various

... head forcibly in a vain effort to clear the stupor that was sweeping over him. It was strange how the vivid rays of that malevolent green moon seemed to sear insidiously into one's brain, stifling thought as a swamp fog ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various

... something from the fauna and flora of those moorlands, where I have so long enjoyed the wonders of nature; never, I can honestly say, alone; because when man was not with me, I had companions in every bee, and flower, and pebble; and never idle, because I could not pass a swamp, or a tuft of heather, without finding in it a fairy tale of which I could but decipher here and there a line or two, and yet found them more interesting than all the books, save one, which were ever written ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley

... by one. Many of them were drawings of outposts, heads of native chiefs, &c. At last he came to one, somewhat larger than the others. It depicted the assault and capture of a Maori pah, standing on a hill that rose gradually from the margin of a reedy swamp. The troops had driven out the defenders, who were shown escaping across the swamp through the reeds, the women and children in the centre, the men surrounding them on all sides to protect them ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke

... afternoon. The grave was dug among some cocoanut palms out beyond the fetid swamp which lay in those days a crescent of foulness on three sides of the town. A wall separated the swamp from the houses, and over this wall the sewage used to be cast. Poles, bearing human heads, stuck out here and there. The swamp was crossed by ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully

... at a fearful rate, with a bank of white foam rolling before us, high above our bows, and away on each side of us like the track of a steamer, so that we expected it every moment to rush in-board and swamp us. I had never seen anything like this before. From the first I had a kind of feeling that ...
— Fighting the Whales • R. M. Ballantyne

... that the Tsars have ever identified themselves with the nation, and have always understood, in part instinctively and in part by reflection, what the nation really required. Whenever the infiltration of Western ideas threatened to swamp the national individuality, the Autocratic Power intervened and averted the danger by timely precautions. Something of the kind may be observed, he believes, at present, when the Liberals are clamouring for a Parliament and a Constitution; but the Autocratic Power ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace

... seems, of the sparkling water. Although more especially esteemed by pretty dears of a different character at the present day, the liquid-eyed fawn, who grace Congress Park, are among those who take their daily rations. At the time of discovery, the low ground about the spring was a mere swamp, and the country in the immediate vicinity a wilderness. The mineral water issued in a small stream from an aperture in the side of the rock, which formed the margin of a small brook, and was caught by pressing a glass to the side of the ...
— Saratoga and How to See It • R. F. Dearborn

... placed the double fare in silver in my palm. Then he gave a whistle and from behind the corners came trooping enough swashbuckler students to swamp my gondola. I let in just enough to fill the seats and pushed off, leaving several standing on the stone steps cursing ...
— The Mintage • Elbert Hubbard

... wantonly laid Osceola in chains some time before. Now Osceola scalped his enemy with his own hands. On the same day, Major Dade, leading a relief expedition from Tampa Bay, was ambushed and overwhelmed near Wahoo Swamp. Only four of his men escaped death. Within forty-eight hours, on the last day of the year, General Clinch, commanding the troops in Florida, won a bloody fight on the banks of ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson

... fringing, which plays an important part in the decoration of garments. The fringe materials were generally of the longest procurable dried moose hair, the finely cut strips of deerskin, or, in some instances, the tough stems of river and swamp grasses twisted, braided and interwoven in every conceivable manner, and varied along the depth of the fringes by small perforated shells, teeth of animals, seeds of pine, or other shapely and hard substances which gave variety and added weight. Beads of bone and shell ...
— The Development of Embroidery in America • Candace Wheeler

... snow, on the borders of a picturesque ditch and roadside, winterly delights, Sunday and week day alike. The tendency of human nature is to look on the bright side of things; and it is much more pleasant to go to the edge of a large swamp, lie down and bask in the summer's sun, making 'button-holes' of daisies, buttercups, and the like, and return home and extol the fine scenery and praise the richness of the land, than to take the spade, in shirt-sleeves and heavy boots, and drain the poisonous water from the roots of vegetation. ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith

... by our forest-rangers who help the timber jacks build these roads. You see, while frost holds good the heaviest tree trunks can be readily moved over icy swamp bottoms, but in the spring, when thaw and freshets begin, the bottoms are more like a marsh, or shallow lake, than anything else I know of. Then these corduroy roads are a make-shift for hard ground," ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy

... of his distinguished friend's opinions in proportion to the immensity of the difficulty he experienced in making anything out of them; 'Bunsby,' said the Captain, quite confounded by admiration, 'you carry a weight of mind easy, as would swamp one of my tonnage soon. But in regard o' this here will, I don't mean to take no steps towards the property—Lord forbid!—except to keep it for a more rightful owner; and I hope yet as the rightful owner, Sol Gills, is living and'll come back, strange as it is that ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens

... ever beheld in her life in the tenements. It was big and mouldy, and dark with cobwebs swinging like dusty curtains over the windows that had not been washed for years. The windows looked out over a swamp that ...
— Madge Morton's Victory • Amy D.V. Chalmers

... doubt justly) that it circulates more books than any similar institution in the world. Take, again, the University of Chicago: seven years ago (or, say, at the outside ten) it had no existence, and its site was a dismal swamp; to-day it is a handsome and populous centre of literary and scientific culture. Observe, too, that it is by no means an oasis in the desert, but is thoroughly in touch with the civic life around it. For instance, it actively participates in the admirable work done by the ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer

... to one another; while epiphytes perched on every branch, and creepers bound the whole forest into a compact mass of vegetation, through which no bird could fly. We could catch the strings of convolvulus with our walking-sticks, as the train passed through the jungle. Sometimes we came upon a swamp, where clusters of bamboos were growing, crowned with tufts of pointed leaves; or had a glimpse for a moment of a group of royal palms ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor

... now led through the bush for mile after mile—little hills and stony ground and swamp-land. By noon we were wet to the knees; but this circumstance was then too insignificant for remark, although later it gave me the narrowest chance for life that ever came ...
— Billy Topsail & Company - A Story for Boys • Norman Duncan

... stretch himself on the rich bed of clover bordering the little brook that whimpered by his schoolhouse, and there con over old Mather's direful tales, until the gathering dusk of evening made the printed page a mere mist before his eyes. Then, as he wended his way by swamp and stream and awful woodland, to the farmhouse where he happened to be quartered, every sound of nature, at that witching hour, fluttered his excited imagination—the moan of the whip-poor-will from the hillside, the boding cry of the tree toad, that harbinger ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie

... swamp that kept us on the corduroy road behind the jolting wagon I remember well; this was near Crawfordsville, Indiana. It is now gone, the corduroy and the timber as well. In their places great barns and comfortable houses dot the landscape as far ...
— Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail • Ezra Meeker

... to me that sham emotions are a woman's form of getting drunk, and nervous prostration is its delirium tremens. Not the least of the suffering caused by emotional excitement comes from mistaken sympathy with others. Certain people seem to live on the principle that if a friend is in a swamp, it is necessary to plunge in with him; and that if the other man is up to his waist, the sympathizer shows his friendliness by allowing the mud to come up to his neck. Whereas, it is evident that the deeper my friend is immersed in a swamp, the more sure I must be ...
— Power Through Repose • Annie Payson Call

... highest hill in Middle Germany. This lake is nearly encircled by ranges of hills which rise from 1,500 to 5,000 feet above its surface; so that the climate of the immediately contiguous country, which is healthy without exception and quite free from swamp, is everywhere temperate, and in some districts positively Arcadian. And this magnificent, picturesque, and in many places highly romantic lake is the basin source of the sacred Nile, which, leaving it at the extreme northern end by the Ripon falls, ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka

... and calls upon the name She learn'd to love him by; The waves have swamp'd her little boat— She sinks before his eye! And he must keep his dangerous post, And ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various

... much for the passer-by as the dweller within. The most tasteful front-yard fence was never an agreeable object of study to me; the most elaborate ornaments, acorn-tops, or what not, soon wearied and disgusted me. Bring your sills up to the very edge of the swamp, then (though it may not be the best place for a dry cellar), so that there be no access on that side to citizens. Front-yards are not made to walk in, but, at most, through, and you could ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various

... mare out in the swamp and put her out of her misery," directed Mr. Langdon after ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Rockies • Frank Gee Patchin

... opened her mouth; she wouldn't speak. She didn't even, look cross. She made a fresh pot of tea, and filled our cups again. She didn't even slam the cups down, or swamp the tea over into the saucers—which would have ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson

... sent the half-bullet through his brain. He dropped back inside. They wouldn't have known he was hit if his wife hadn't cried out for quarter. They burst open the door and carried her off, with her daughter and one son. Another boy escaped out of a back window and hid in the swamp, and they couldn't find him. Afterward he settled on an island close to Vinalhaven, where Heron's Neck Light ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman

... off as early as possible through the thorn scrub on a compass bearing that we hoped would bring us to a reported swamp at the head of the Swanee River. The Swanee River was one of the sources of the Tsavo. Of course this was guesswork. We did not know certainly the location of the swamp, its distance from us, nor what lay between us and it. However, we loaded all our transportable vessels ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White

... Bungo, how shall we manage? You don't mean to swamp us in a shove through that surf, do you?" ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various

... ahead of him was not far away, and he laughed and hunched his shoulders when he saw that his magnificent Malemutes were making three times the speed of the huskies. It was a short chase. It led across the narrow plain and into a dense tangle of swamp, where the huskies had picked their way in aimless wandering until they came out in thick balsam and Banksian pine. Half a mile farther on, and the trail broke into an open which led down to ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood

... and the crow Come and go; Where the merchant deals in indigo and tea, Hides and ghi; Where the Babu drops inflammatory hints In his prints; Stands a City—Charnock chose it—packed away Near a Bay— By the Sewage rendered fetid, by the sewer Made impure, By the Sunderbunds unwholesome, by the swamp Moist and damp; And the City and the Viceroy, ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

... 200 acres, which could probably be drained and converted into good grass land. Here I also found cranberry vines in a flourishing condition and their fruit. Three or four miles back from the coast at this point, lies a tract of several hundred acres of swamp grass land, which by drainage, would afford considerable pasturage. A narrow strip of grazing land, from five to fifteen rods in width, extends for about three miles along the seashore, eastward from near the mouth of the Hi-ellen River. Five or six miles south-west ...
— Official report of the exploration of the Queen Charlotte Islands - for the government of British Columbia • Newton H. Chittenden

... tell you about a place on Venus," said Greg. "It's in the center of a big swamp that stretches for hundreds of miles in every direction. It's a sort of mountain rising out of the swamp. And the swamp is filled with beasts and reptiles of every kind. Ravenous things, lusting for blood. But they don't climb the mountain. A man, ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak

... that we'll have to fix on some course in the next few days," added his companion. "Say we run in to make inquiries"—and a gleam of grim amusement crept into his eyes—"what are we going to find? A beach with a roaring surf on it, and if we get a boat through, a desolate, half-frozen swamp behind it. It's quite likely there are people in the country, Koriaks or Kamtchadales, but if there are they'll probably move up and down after what they get to eat like the Huskies do, and we can't hang on and wait for them. Most any time next month we'll have ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss

... and Grafton, the last newspaper man ashore, was making for the front—with Bob close at his heels. It was hot, very hot, but the road was a good, hard path of clean sand, and now and then a breeze stirred, or a light, cool rain twinkled in the air. On each side lay marsh, swamp, pool, and tropical jungle—and, to Grafton's Northern imagination, strange diseases lurked like monsters everywhere. Every strange, hot odour made him uneasy and, at times, he found himself turning his head and holding his breath, as he always did when he passed ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.

... Timothy Boardman of Wethersfield, he owned, what by a little change of circumstances, might have brought, not a competence merely but wealth to his heirs. Early in his residence at Rutland, he became possessed, with many others of a small lot in what was called the "Cedar Swamp." These lots were valued almost exclusively for the enduring material for fences which they afforded. Their cedar posts supplied the town. They obtained also on the rocky portions of these lands a white sand, ...
— Log-book of Timothy Boardman • Samuel W Boardman

... environs beyond the Saint's house, further than which nobody ever seemed to penetrate; and, indeed, it was but seldom that I had heard of a Jew's making the blessing over lofty mountains or beautiful trees. Perhaps because our country was for the most part only a great swamp. But often had I occasion in these walks to say, "Blessed art thou, O Lord our God, who hast such things in Thy world." I scarcely ever saw a human creature, which somehow comforted and uplifted me. Only once were my ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... windfall, when the capon flew toward him. To stealing was added offences much more malicious, several discreet Puritan lads, sons of the foremost land holders having been induced by sudden temptation, to join him in running Mr. Bradstreet's wheels down hill into a swamp, while at a later date they watched him recreating himself in the same manner alone, testifying that he "took a wheele off Mr. Bradstreet's tumbril and ran it down hill, and got an old wheel from Goodman Barnard's land, & sett it ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell

... him more than necessary, I spent part of an evening studying up the nesting habits of the chat,—the long-tailed, yellow-breasted, as I found him to be,—and the next morning made a thorough search through the swamp, looking into every bush and examining every thicket. An hour or two of this hard work satisfied me for the day, and I went home warm and tired, followed to the very door by the mocking voice, triumphing, as it seemed, ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller

... objected to giving them any share in the Government. The meaning of this ingenious distinction is clear. The Administration was tottering, and the only chance they saw of strengthening their position was to buy off the opposition of the followers of the late Cabinet. To swamp their opponents and at the same time keep the actual power in their own hands, was a piece of strategy which might be expected from the general character of Lord Shelburne's tactics. But it failed, and failed ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos

... wild orgies of excitement, the utter divorce between the moral virtues and what is called religion, which obtain among the millions of the plantation negroes of the South, are but little understood. By one who knows it, the Black Belt has been called the great Dismal Swamp, the vast black malarial slough ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 50, No. 4, April 1896 • Various

... "He is going to have a warm, snug Christmas in a snug, warm hospital; and here's me only lorst in this bloomin' swamp, an' got to report for duty somewhere in the mornin'—Lord knows where!" he ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times

... on the Chester Pike, knowing I would cross a good sized stream, on a stone bridge, about a mile and a half out of Salem; then I would pass a crossroad and find a swamp on my right, between the road and the stream. About a mile and a half from the crossroad I just mentioned, I would cross a railroad track and then I would know that at the fork of the roads one-quarter of ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss

... unceasing; danger may not exist, but he must ever guard against it, for he knows not where it may lurk. With him, security is temerity and eventual destruction. The ambushed savage, the crouching beast of prey, the silent and deadly reptile, the verdant swamp, flower-strewn and fathomless, wooing to destruction, the rushing torrent and resistless hurricane, are but a few of the dangers through which he threads his way. And when, at close of day, weary and hungry, foot-sore or saddle-galled, he halts for refreshment and repose, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various

... sitting rigidly erect, looking out over the level black sea with its shifting, chalky line of light, and a long silence followed. The antiphonal crying of the owls sounded over the bubbling swamp, the mephitic perfume hung like a vapor on the shore. John ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer

... which had once echoed to his father's horn: for miles and miles they extended in trackless mazes of underwood, swamp, and brake; and report already credited them with being the haunt of ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake

... middle of the forest there was a dense thicket of lower growths on a piece of dry land lifted above the waters of a swamp. The place was the lair of such small wild things as still survived in the wilderness once the haunt of the wolf and the wild cat, and the resort of the bear allured by the profusion of the huckleberries ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells

... there in the swamp, O singer bashful and tender! I hear your notes, I hear your call, I hear, I come presently, I understand you; But a moment I linger, for the lustrous star has detained me, The star my departing comrade ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various

... "You know all that cypress you saw 'em yankin' out of the swamp back of the Point? Well, suh, it's lumber now, every stick. Sold, too. That's what me and pop ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford

... you have a fortune to leave them. O man and woman! have you not learned that, like vultures, like hawks, like eagles, riches have wings and fly away? Though you should be successful in leaving a competency behind you, the trickery of executors may swamp it in a night; or some elders or deacons of our churches may get up an oil company, or some sort of religious enterprise sanctioned by the church, and induce your orphans to put their money into a hole in Venango County; and if, by the most skilful derricks, the ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage

... himself almost into a swamp. He was obliged to walk upon bog tufts and watch his feet to keep from the oily mire. Pausing at one time to look about him he saw, out at some black water, a small animal pounce in and emerge directly with ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane

... scenery is always the same. Mile after mile of stunted trees: some hewn down by the axe, some blown down by the wind, some half fallen and resting on their neighbours, many mere logs half hidden in the swamp, others mouldered away to spongy chips. The very soil of the earth is made up of minute fragments such as these; each pool of stagnant water has its crust of vegetable rottenness; on every side there are the boughs, and trunks, and stumps of trees, in every possible stage ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens

... wonderland of swamp and tree-choked streams. Somewhere up its chequered reaches Smith left the shallop with men to guard it, and, taking two of the party with two Indian guides, went on in a canoe up a narrower way. Presently those left with the boat incautiously go ashore ...
— Pioneers of the Old South - A Chronicle of English Colonial Beginnings, Volume 5 In - The Chronicles Of America Series • Mary Johnston

... across it. In one spot it was so very bad that a mule laden with baggage had got stuck in it, and tug as he might, his master was quite unable to pull him out. The muleteer in despair appealed to the two horsemen, who were carefully skirting the swamp at some distance off, but they paid no heed to his cries, and he began to talk cheerfully to his mule, hoping to keep up his spirits, declaring that if the poor beast would only have a little patience help ...
— The Lilac Fairy Book • Andrew Lang

... banish nature and joy from the heart! A pedantic age loves all that is pretentious, glaring, and assuming; and Rhythm stoops to rock the cradle of the newborn infant; to soothe the negro in the rice swamp or cotton field; to shape into beauty the national and patriotic songs of a laborious but contented peasantry, as among the Sclaves—but what cares the age for the happiness of the race? 'Put money in thy purse,' is its consolation and lesson ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various

... immense silence of drenched rice-fields, where the yellow-green level is broken at long intervals by the black silhouette of some irrigating machine;—but, whichever of the five different routes be pursued, you will find yourself more than once floating through sombre mazes of swamp-forest,—past assemblages of cypresses all hoary with the parasitic tillandsia, and grotesque as gatherings of fetich-gods. Ever from river or from lakelet the steamer glides again into canal or bayou,—from bayou or canal once more into lake or bay; and sometimes the swamp-forest visibly thins ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn

... to October the south-west monsoon, bringing in the heavily-laden rain-clouds from the sea, pours upon the country its torrential rains, which change this beautiful forest into a swamp. The quiet creeks become turbid rivers, while the hill-sides are torn by innumerable torrents, which, washing away the earth from the roots of the trees, cause them to fall crashing among the dripping undergrowth. ...
— Burma - Peeps at Many Lands • R.Talbot Kelly

... we have now are merely four-room frame buildings for the men on the place, and we have fixed up one of them for our home until we build a larger and better house down near the spring. There isn't a particle of swamp about it; but there is plenty of good solid earth all around it. Of course, we can cut a splendid road from the depot down to it. We will build stables and all the necessary out-houses down there, too, and will fence it in, so that ...
— Fred Fearnot's New Ranch - and How He and Terry Managed It • Hal Standish

... come to be used so continuously, and sometimes so meaninglessly that they bid fair to crowd out the sweet, strong words, "man" and "woman," and a revulsion of taste has swept in that goes nigh in some "sets" to utterly swamp the "lady" and "gentleman." ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke

... than thirty years ago Rangoon consisted of a mere swamp, with a few mat huts mounted on wooden piles, and surrounded by a log stockade and fosse. Now it is a city of 200,000 inhabitants, the terminus of a railway, and almost rivals Bombay in beauty and extent. It possesses fine palaces, ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey

... at the little station and hunted our way up, making great sweeps and jogs, as hunters must, to take in certain spots we thought promising—certain ravines and swamp edges where we are always sure of hearing the thunderous whir of partridge wings, or the soft, shrill whistle of woodcock. At noon we broiled chops and rested in the lee of the wood edge, where, even in the late fall, one can usually find spots ...
— More Jonathan Papers • Elisabeth Woodbridge

... me began a sort of swamp with reeds which hardly moved to the air, and this gradually merged into a sheet of water above and beyond which were hills, barren and not very high, which took the last of the daylight, for they looked both southward and to the west. The more I watched the extraordinary and absolute scene the ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc

... boat!" cries Blunt. "I'll burn a blue light every hour for you, Mr. Best; and take care they don't swamp you. Lower away, lads!" As the second prisoner took the oar of Frere's boat, he uttered a groan and fell forward, recovering himself instantly. Sarah Purfoy, leaning over the side, ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke

... couching themselves slowly in the hollows of the horizon; the sweep of cornfields and woods and distant farms growing dim,—daguerreotype-like; the tinkle of the sheep-bells on the meadows, the shouts of the boys in camp yonder, the bass drone of the frogs in the swamp dulling down into the remoteness of sleep. The Doctor slackened his sharp, jerking stride, and fell into the monotonous gait of his companion, glancing up to him. McKinstry, he thought, was going out to battle to-morrow with just as cool phlegm and childlike ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various

... you could get a barrel of nuts from it. It bore again this last summer heavily, not in clusters of ten but in clusters of seven or eight. When we have damp soil we can't grow the chestnut but the hickory nut will grow in a swamp, and so ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Third Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association

... Homes now, this summer of 1884. No longer are we in the midst of bush and swamp, as we were ten years ago. The land has been cleared up and a good part of it brought under cultivation, fences have been put up, and several new buildings added. Let us visit the Shingwauk Home first. We ...
— Missionary Work Among The Ojebway Indians • Edward Francis Wilson

... marched leisurely along with his brave army until he came within four miles of Richmond, where there was a great swamp called the Chickahominy. The name of this swamp will be long remembered by our brave soldiers of the Army of the Potomac. The rain fell like a deluge, and flooded it; and it gave out deadly fevers, which brought death ...
— Siege of Washington, D.C. • F. Colburn Adams

... glandular secretion of the Chinese swamp-adder is also beyond price. Again-the case upon the pedestal yonder contains five perfect bulbs, three already in flower, as you observe, of an orchid discovered by our chief chemist in certain forests of Burma. It only occurs ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer

... slipped off with Jerry to look after some colts on the black swamp, and was gone all the afternoon; and so Dad missed me; and when I got home didn't I CATCH IT! Oh lord, I'm all over blue wales; but ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley

... communication with Arabia and India, and the Nile with Abyssinia and the Mediterranean, Thebes was thus naturally allied to the richest countries on the globe; an alliance that procured it an activity so much the greater, as Lower Egypt, at first a swamp, was nearly, if not totally, uninhabited. But when at length this country had been drained by the canals and dikes which Sesostris constructed, population was introduced there, and wars arose which proved ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney

... all evil consequences, or perhaps he was case-hardened to such things. It was not uncommon with him to spend whole winter nights on a neighboring "broad," in pursuit of the mere-fowl that haunted it, in water or ice or swamp. He treated his body as an enemy, and strove to subdue it—though not for the good reasons of the Apostle—by every sort of harshness and imprudence; or rather he behaved toward it as a wayward father toward his child—at one time with cruel severity, at another with the utmost ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn

... little drugstore was! I was fascinated by the rows and rows of gleaming bottles labelled with mysterious Latin abbreviations. There were cases of patent remedies—Mexican Mustang Liniment, Swamp Root, Danderine, Conway's Cobalt Pills, Father Finch's Febrifuge, Spencer's Spanish Specific. Soap, talcum, cold cream, marshmallows, tobacco, jars of rock candy, what a medley of paternostrums! And old Rhubarb himself, in ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley

... you at once, my friend,—we were brought to opposite an inhuman swamp on the coast of Siberia, fifty miles or more to the west of North-east Cape; and there what remained of the crew made shift to cast anchor; and for a day and night the ragged ship curtsied to the land, like a blind beggar to an empty street, and we only dozed in our ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes

... Funda, or in the neighbourhood, any lake or collection of waters or large swamps; in which case, you are to go round such lake or swamp, and be very particular in examining whether any river flows into or out of it, and in what direction it takes ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish

... weariness so utter that it seemed to swamp all feeling. Tudor turned his frowning regard upon her. His eyes behind their glasses intently searched ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell

... a dozen tribes come in from the jungles and the bush, the desert and the swamp areas of the sources of the Niger, to look for work on the new projects, to visit relatives, to market for the products of civilization—or to gawk. Homer Crawford disappeared ...
— Border, Breed Nor Birth • Dallas McCord Reynolds

... thirty by river, the stream which runs past the landing-place at Matang having its outlet at Santubong. It was once intended by the Sarawak Government to make a road from Kuching to the mountain, but on being surveyed the intermediate country was found to contain a deep swamp four miles across, so the project ...
— On the Equator • Harry de Windt

... the awning on the top deck. This was much more pleasant than down in the stuffy cabin. After leaving Moreton Bay the sea became rough. A water spout formed not far from the ship, and it appeared large enough to swamp us had we been under it. The wind made it hard to light matches for a smoke, so Captain Pennefather introduced his flint and steel, and lit a stick composed of dry buffalo manure; this we found very useful with which to ...
— Reminiscences of Queensland - 1862-1869 • William Henry Corfield

... Massachusetts,—frequent; Rhode Island,—not reported; Connecticut,—rare; on north shore of Spectacle ponds in Kent (Litchfield county), at an elevation of 1200 feet; Newton (Fairfield county), a few scattered trees in a swamp at an altitude of 400 feet: (New Haven county) a few small trees at Bethany; at Middlebury abundant in a swamp of five acres (E. ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame

... memory winter's cold and snow. Several weeks of wandering through the woods during the months of January and February taught me that to him who has time to devote, and that amount of patience which enables a hunter to rise at three in the morning, crawl through wet, tangled swamp-grass in the cold and snow, and then sit shivering for hours in a "hide" awaiting the ducks, there will be shots, camera shots, replete with interest and full of instruction; revelations of a world's population little known because of their unobtrusive life. They who lead the ...
— Ohio Arbor Day 1913: Arbor and Bird Day Manual - Issued for the Benefit of the Schools of our State • Various

... old Nick of the present English, and Grendel—probably, the Geruthus of Saxo Grammaticus—are the chief supernaturals, demons of the swamp and fen. These best localize the legends in which they appear; for which most parts of Hanover and the Cimbric Chersonesus suit indifferently, the Frisian portions pre-eminently, well. The more exalted ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham

... of admonition; and for some little time nothing was heard but the sounds that in the plains of Saint Domingo never cease—the humming and buzzing of myriads of insects, the occasional chattering of monkeys in a neighbouring wood, and, with a passing gust, a chorus of frogs from a distant swamp. Unconscious of this din, from being accustomed always to hear more or less of it, the boy amused himself with chasing the fireflies, whose light began to glance around as darkness descended. His sister was poring over her work, ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau

... now, and we have Lake Menzaleh on one side, and a low sandy plain, once covered with water, on the other," continued the commander. "It is difficult to believe that the swamp and lagoon on the starboard were once covered with fertile fields, watered by two of the branches of the Nile, where wheat was raised in abundance, from which Rome and other countries were ...
— Asiatic Breezes - Students on The Wing • Oliver Optic

... constant companion of her large sisterhood. Even Jessie failed to comfort her, and she could find little courage within herself. And yet there were moments when the vigour that had led her once to defy Valentine, when the fire that had sprung up in her, as a flame may burst forth in a swamp, seemed to be near to her again. She felt a new possibility within her, stirring, striving. It was at such moments that she longed to see the doctor, and could have cursed him for not coming to her. For at such ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens

... such comfort could not continue. Ere long this flame, with its cheerful light and heat, was gone: the jungle, it is true, had been consumed; but, with its entanglements, its shelter and its spots of verdure also; and the black, chill, ashy swamp, left in its stead, seemed for a time a ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... there a good while thinking and thinking to hisself, and then he got the frog out and prized his mouth open and took a teaspoon and filled him full of quail shot—filled him pretty near up to his chin—and set him on the floor. Smiley he went to the swamp and slopped around in the mud for a long time, and finally he ketched a frog, and fetched him in, and give him to this feller, ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)

... abyss; and I did stop, And ask of all my company, 'What cheer? If there be spirits abroad that call to us, Sirs, hold your peace and hear,' So they gave heed, And one man said, 'It is the small ground-doves That peck upon the stony hillocks': one, 'It is the mammoth in yon cedar swamp That cheweth in his dream': and one, 'My lord, It is the ghost of him that yesternight We slew, because he grudged to yield his wife To thy great father, when he peaceably Did send to take her,' Then I answered, 'Pass,' And they went on; and I did lay mine ear ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow

... understand. But until I see it with my own eyes, which I am not likely to, I never will believe that there is any means of avoiding death, even for a time, or that there is or was a white sorceress living in the heart of an African swamp. It is bosh, my boy, all ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard

... breath. Cy's tellin' himself fairy yarns and he hopes he believes 'em. Man alive! can't you SEE? Ain't he gettin' more foolish over the young one every day? Don't she boss him round like the overseer on a cranberry swamp? Don't he look more contented than he has sence he got off the cars? I tell you, Bailey, that child fills a place in Whit's life that's been runnin' to seed and needed weedin'. Nothin' could fill it better—unless 'twas a ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln

... "I gathered the wood in the marsh, then I went straight across the back field through the swamp. It's ...
— Rose O'Paradise • Grace Miller White

... down in the Delta country. I'm leasing three hundred acres of the Teal Slough land to him." Dick addressed himself to the farm students. "That land lies just out of Sacramento on the west side of the river. It's a good example of the land famine that is surely coming. It was tule swamp when I bought it, and I was well laughed at by the old-timers. I even had to buy out a dozen hunting preserves. It averaged me eighteen dollars an acre, and not so many ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London

... their consuls, or at the mast-heads of the barks which crowd the harbour. Even at the time of which I speak, there were upwards of twenty thousand inhabitants, while in no place are so many flourishing merchants to be found. A few years ago this place was a mere swamp, with a few huts on it, inhabited by barbarians. It will be asked, What has worked this change? I reply, Commerce. Its position on a great highway of trade—a strong government, and protection to all comers, and ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston

... progressed the way become more uncertain, and at last they reached the edge of a swamp, beyond which was some kind of a cane-brake. They saw numerous footprints in the soft soil, and these led further ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - or The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht. • Edward Stratemeyer (AKA Arthur M. Winfield)

... specialism. They know their business, but are ignorant of everything which is outside it. So that to preserve their self-conceit they question everything, are crudely and crookedly critical. They appear to be sceptics and are in reality simpletons; they swamp their wits in interminable arguments. Almost all conveniently adopt social, literary, or political prejudices, to do away with the need of having opinions, just as they adapt their conscience to the standard ...
— The Girl with the Golden Eyes • Honore de Balzac

... reached Huron River to find it swollen and out of its bank, giving us much trouble to get across, the road along the bottom lands being partly covered with logs and rails, but once across we were in the town and when we enquired about the road around to Detroit, they said the country was all a swamp and 30 miles wide and in Spring impassible. They called it the Maumee or Black Swamp, We were advised to go by water, when a steamboat came up the river bound for Detroit we put our wagons and horses on board, and camped on the lower deck ourselves. We had our own ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly

... leisure in a peaceful bed. Such then was thy case, loveliest Laodamia, to be bereft of husband sweeter than life, and than soul; thou being sucked in so great a whirlpool of love, its eddy submerged thee in its steep abyss, like (so folk say) to the Graian gulph near Pheneus of Cyllene with its fat swamp's soil drained and dried, which aforetime the falsely-born Amphitryoniades dared to hew through the marrow of cleft mountains, at the time when he smote down the Stymphalian monsters with sure shafts by ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus

... the statutes and the courts, the fewness and the laxity of officials was such that from time to time other agencies were called into play. For example the maraudings of runaway slaves camped in Belle Isle swamp, a score of miles above Savannah, became so serious and lasting that their haven had to be several times destroyed by the Georgia militia. On one of these occasions, in 1786, a small force first employed was obliged to withdraw in the face of the blacks, and reinforcements merely succeeded ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

... maps of the seventeenth century. From those books and maps it is clear that many routes which now pass through an endless succession of orchards, cornfields, hayfields, and beanfields, then ran through nothing but heath, swamp, and warren. [63] In the drawings of English landscapes made in that age for the Grand Duke Cosmo, scarce a hedgerow is to be seen, and numerous tracts; now rich with cultivation, appear as bare as Salisbury Plain. [64] At Enfield, hardly out of sight of the smoke of the capital, was a region ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... hill, the others following as fast as they could, but not fast enough, for before they came within shot, the party was halted by Hobomok's return, who half glorious, half laughing, reported the enemy hidden in a swamp, whither ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin

... the two women for the risk they ran to save a probably broken-legged little beast: and he escaped the melting mood by forcing a sneer at the sort of stuff out of which popular ballads are woven. Carinthia was accused of letting her adventurous impulses and sentimental female compassion swamp thought of a mother's duties. If both those women had broken their legs the child might have cried itself into fits for the mother, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... those makers were men of no ordinary genius—men who worked lovingly, guided by motives distinct from commercial gain, so long as they were allowed to live by their work. When, however, the duties on foreign musical instruments were removed, the effect was to partially swamp the gallant little band of Fiddle-makers, who were quite unable to compete with the French and German makers in price (not excellence, be it distinctly understood, for we were undoubtedly ahead of our foreign competitors, both in style and finish, ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart



Words linked to "Swamp" :   wetland, fill up, swamp white oak, Everglades, fill, slough, situation, make full



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