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Wallow   Listen
verb
Wallow  v. i.  (past & past part. wallowed; pres. part. wallowing)  
1.
To roll one's self about, as in mire; to tumble and roll about; to move lazily or heavily in any medium; to flounder; as, swine wallow in the mire. "I may wallow in the lily beds."
2.
To live in filth or gross vice; to disport one's self in a beastly and unworthy manner. "God sees a man wallowing in his native impurity."
3.
To wither; to fade. (Prov. Eng. & Scot.)






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Wallow" Quotes from Famous Books



... concretelined bed of the Los Angeles River. Here ineffectual shallow pools had preserved illusion and given tourists something at which to laugh in the dry season; the weed licked them up like a thirsty cow at a wallow. Up and down and over the river it ran, ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore

... degradation by gambling with certain 'noble and exalted' personages of renown, saved himself, as it were, by the skin of his teeth, through marriage with a rich American girl whose father was blessed with unlimited, oil-mines. He was thereby enabled to wallow in wealth with an impaired digestion and shattered nervous power, while capricious Fate played him her usual trick in her usual way by denying him any heirs to his married millions. His first-born brother, Robert, wedded for love, and ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli

... play on 'Unix wizard', common among hackers who use Unix by necessity but would prefer alternatives. The implication is that although the person in question may consider mastery of Unix arcana to be a wizardly skill, the only real skill involved is the ability to tolerate (and the bad taste to wallow in) the incoherence and needless complexity that is alleged to infest many Unix programs. "This shell script tries to parse its arguments in 69 bletcherous ways. It must have been written by a real Unix weenie." 2. A derogatory term for anyone who ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0

... inches, the trail eighteen; but the trail, packed down fully a foot by the traffic, was like a gutter. On either side spread the blanket of soft snow crystals. If a man turned into this in an endeavor to pass, his dogs would wallow perforce to their bellies and slow down to a snail's pace. So the men lay close to their leaping sleds and waited. No alteration in position occurred down the fifteen miles of Bonanza and Klondike to Dawson, where the Yukon was encountered. Here the first relays ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London

... of Cameliard was waste, Thick with wet woods, and many a beast therein, And none or few to scare or chase the beast; So that wild dog and wolf and boar and bear Came night and day, and rooted in the fields, And wallow'd in the gardens of the King. And ever and anon the wolf would steal The children and devour, but now and then, Her own brood lost or dead, lent her fierce teat To human sucklings; and the children housed In her foul den, there ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various

... footlights, and the necessity of adjusting herself superficially to her environment, under pain of unpopularity. Her isolation and the privacy of her home-life already made sufficiently for that. And to be disliked even by those she disliked Eileen disliked. Her nature needed to wallow in warm admiration. ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill

... Virgil's lachrymae rerum hints at mystic and extra-human yearnings; to the troubadours nature was conventionally stereotyped—a scenic decoration to set off sentiments more or less sincere; the roman-ticists wallow in her rugged aspects. Horace never allowed phantasy to outrun intelligence; he kept his feet on earth; man was the measure of his universe, and a sober mind his highest attribute. Nature must be kept "in her place." Her extrava-gances ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas

... repeat his race and retrace his journey across the borders of the Free Negro States still more rapidly than he came. * * * Great cleansing and purification are needed and will be given to that festering sink of iniquity, that wallow of Lincoln and Scott—the desecrated city of Washington; and many indeed will be the carcasses of dogs and caitiff that will blacken the air upon the gallows before the great work is accomplished. So ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan

... terror-stricken to speak, for we felt that still the wind grew stronger, and the lake began to rise into waves, and the craft to wallow; but well-nigh therewith was the dusk and the mist gone; the sky was bright blue overhead, and the westering sun shone cloudless; but on no land it shone, or on aught save the blue ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris

... hand passes over all earth, spreading forth its beauties unerring as the seasons—stretches through cloudland, revealing its delectable glories, or, eagle-like, soars right up against the sun;—or seaward goes seizing the cresting foam as it leaps—the ships and their crews as they wallow in the watery valleys, or climb their steeps, or hang over their flying ridges:—daring and doing all whatsoever it shall dare to do, with boundless fruitfulness of idea, and power, and line; that is mature art—art of the time of Phidias, of Raffaelle, ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various

... his enemy on the battle-field were suddenly to see before him his mother or the good and gentle wife or daughter he loved, he would drop the saber and fly to hide himself like a murderer. So, I, overwhelmed, said to myself: "I can not go on! Let these wretches wallow in their own vileness. I shall not wallow with them. ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips

... which they had been captured. Others had red wounds on the ends of their noses where they had butted against the rocks or the timbers of the dam. There were some hundreds of the fish, and every now and then a huge thirty-pounder would wallow on top of the water, or a small, lively one would spring high into the air and fall back with a sounding splash on his side. Here they must wait through the summer, the pool becoming daily hotter, more crowded, ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke

... Parker, or the "spiritual faculty" of Mr. Newman, of such singular use as to supersede all external revelation, since by the unfortunate "conceptions" of the one, and the "degraded types" of the other, it has for ages left man, and does, in fact, now leave him, to wallow in the lowest depths of the most debasing idolatry and superstition; since, by the confession of these very writers, the great bulk of mankind have been and are hideously mal-formed, in fact, spiritual cripples, and have been left to wander in infinitely varied paths of error, but always paths ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers

... of the sluice, we were immediately in the Zuider Zee, whose yellow waves rocked "Lorelei" as if she were a cradle, causing the barge to wallow heavily in our wake. Should the weather be rough at any time when we have seaports to visit, "Lorelei" and her consort will have to lie in harbor, and the party must be satisfied to do the journey on a commonplace passenger-boat. But on such a day ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson

... two miles long by a mile broad. For three hours a considerable portion of the reef had been exposed to the glare of the sun, and the incoming tide filched heat, stored by solar rays, from coral and stones and sand. The first wallow provoked an exclamation of amazement, for the water was several degrees hotter than the air, and it was the hottest hour (3 p.m.) of an extremely hot day. No thermometer was at hand to register the actual temperature of the water, but subsequent tests at ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield

... Brethren, who may be taken to include schoolmasters, professors, and good parents. How any child survives without losing his eyesight altogether is now a marvel to me. Certainly, very few retain more than a dim vision, which permits them to wallow amongst imitations (such as a last year's Chippendale morality) and imagine themselves well furnished. My new university (after Owens College an admirable hot-bed for some products under glass) was the Hydrabad, 1600 ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts

... like taking his dope lying down there'll be something like murder done. If I'm any judge of boys, or men, that kid's going to find every muck hole in Leaping Horse—and there's some—and he's going to wallow in 'em till some one comes along and hauls him clear of the filth. What he's going to be like after—why, the thought makes me sweat! ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum

... hands on their knees, remained like that idle for hours. Not many men were met; but a few lay on the scorched grass, sleeping heavily in the sunlight. However, the stench was becoming unbearable—a stench of misery as when the human animal eschews all cleanliness to wallow in filth. And matters were made worse by the smell from a small, improvised market—the emanations of the rotting fruit, cooked and sour vegetables, and stale fried fish which a few poor women had set out on the ground amidst a ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... freedom ere you're married!" "You'll get no fun then!" "H-ssh, don't tell that story! He'll have a wife soon!" — God! the sitting down To drink till you were sodden!... Like great light She came into his thoughts. That was the worst. To wallow in the mud like this because His friends were fools.... He was not fit to touch, To see, oh far, far off, that silver place Where God stood manifest to man in her.... Fouling himself.... One thing he brought to her, ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet

... known to himself these delights, they might be lost for ever. He wished he had a hundred men's energies, with which to enjoy her. [He wished he were a cat, to lick her with a rough, grating, lascivious tongue. He wanted to wallow in her, bury himself in her flesh, cover himself over ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

... labourer who has, and they burn to enjoy similar privileges: and should their place of occupation be too remote from a theatre of indulgence, they get a week of holiday at Sydney, where they arrive in numbers, and, for the time they stay, wallow in every species of debauchery. In such a state of society the public standard of morality must necessarily fall to a very low degree. The leaven spreads from the corrupted part into the whole mass. Just as the slang of London thieves is become the classical ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 547, May 19, 1832 • Various

... leaped into the river and was very shortly across safely on the other side, the hideous reptiles taking no more notice of him than if he had been one of themselves, continuing to wallow about in ...
— The Penang Pirate - and, The Lost Pinnace • John Conroy Hutcheson

... bore the letters and numbers of their peace-time vocation: F.D. for Fleetwood, G.Y. for Grimsby, B.F. for Banff, and P.D. for Peterhead. They were steam herring drifters in the ordinary, common, or garden, piping times of peace; little vessels which went to sea for days on end to pitch, wallow, and roll at the end of a mile or a mile and a half of buoyed drift-net, in the meshes of which unwary herring, in endeavouring to force a way through, presently found ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling

... with filth, what vermine to call them I know not, or wormes, or flyes, or what worse? They are like cupping glasses, that draw nothing but corrupt blood; like swine, that leave the cleare springs to wallow in a puddle: they doo not as Plutarke and Aristarcus derive philosophie, and set flowers out of Homer; but with Zoylus deride his halting, and pull asunder his faire joynted verses: they doo not seeke honie with the bee, but suck poyson with the spider. They will doo nought, ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson

... one who possesses resolution enough to reign with the vigor and power of Zenobia. Her two brothers, who have remained in the city, Herennianus and Timolaus, leave all affairs of state to her and the council; they preferring the base pleasures of sensuality, in which they wallow day and night in company with Antiochus and his crew. If a deep depression is sometimes seen to rest upon her spirit, it comes rather when she thinks of her mother, than of herself. She experiences already, through her lively sympathies, the grief that will rage ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware

... filthy sloughs they roll a prurient skin, They graze and wallow, breed and sleep; And oft some brainless devil enters in, And drives them to ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson

... a fire in his hand By thinking on the frosty Caucasus? Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite By bare imagination of a feast? Or wallow naked in December snow, By thinking on fantastic Summer's heat? O, no! the apprehension of the good Gives but the greater feeling to the worse. King Richard II., ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various

... himself to be) essayed to give a cry of surprise, but found that he could merely grunt, and that, in a word, he was just such another beast as his companions. It looked so intolerably absurd to see hogs on cushioned thrones, that they made haste to wallow down upon all fours, like other swine. They tried to groan and beg for mercy, but forthwith emitted the most awful grunting and squealing that ever came out of swinish throats. They would have wrung their hands in despair, but, attempting ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various

... and down-stream for the sheer delight of wandering, and found fresh interest in every clam-flat, lily cove, or sprouting bed of sweet-flag. Their appetites they had always with them; and though it was fun to chase each other, or to roll and wallow luxuriously on the cool surface of the water when the sun shone warm, there was nothing quite so worth while, day in and day out, as eating. Other muskrats now appeared, the wander-spirit seizing them all at once; and the males had many fierce fights, which left their naked tails scarred and bleeding. ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts

... stock operator makes apparently overnight are often subjects for the world's wonder and envy. But if the gains are great, the road is muddy. If those who covet the golden rewards will participate in a deal or two, wallow in the filthy double-dealing which is an inevitable part of the cost price of success, they will quickly realize the dark side of the glittering game, and that the sacrifices are in proportion to the winnings. If I had been asked that night what price would recompense me for the hell Addicks' ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson

... good does money do them if they don't have the right mind to use it? My granny used to say still you can tie a silk ribbon round a pig's neck but she'll wallow in the dirt just the same first chance she'll get. I guess some people are like that. Well, Martin, I'm goin' in to tell Millie—the women—it's all right with you. They was so upset about it. And won't Millie talk!" He chuckled at the ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers

... only part of the performance. We watched it wallow into deep ditches and out, splash through a brook, and mow down trees more'n a foot thick. And all the time the crew were pokin' out wicked-lookin' guns, big and little, that swung round and hunted us out ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford

... dear and best rewarded whose words and deeds are the most atrocious, to the great reproach and scandal of the world of to-day; whereby it is abundantly manifest that virtue has departed from the earth, leaving a degenerate generation to wallow in the ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio

... embellish'd, and beneath Footstool'd magnificent, she made me sit. Then mingling for me in a golden cup My bev'rage, she infused a drug, intent On mischief; but when I had drunk the draught Unchanged, she smote me with her wand, and said. 390 Hence—seek the sty. There wallow with thy friends. She spake; I drawing from beside my thigh My faulchion keen, with death-denouncing looks Rush'd on her; she with a shrill scream of fear Ran under my rais'd arm, seized fast my ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer

... fill the air with a shrilling sound, And thunder music to the gods above: Mars shall himself breathe down A peerless crown upon brave envy's head, And raise his chivall with a lasting fame. In this brave music Envy takes delight, Where I may see them wallow in their blood, To spurn at arms and legs quite shivered off, And hear the cries of many thousand slain. How likst thou this, my trull? this sport ...
— 2. Mucedorus • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]

... started, it must by any means be kept going, that as great a distance as possible may be covered before it stops again. The poor brutes, sinking almost to their bellies despite the snow-shoeing, have no purchase for the exercise of their strength and continually flounder and wallow. Our whip was lost and I was glad of it, for even as considerate a boy as Arthur is apt to lose patience and temper when, having started the sled with much labour by gee pole and rope about his chest, it goes but a few feet and comes to a halt again, or slips from the track and turns over in the ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck

... poetic pieces which have come down to us from the remotest antiquity are generally inspired with a purer sentiment and a loftier purpose than the modern; and it may be said of them all that when they do step into the mud it is not to tarry and wallow in it; it is rather with the unconscious naivete of ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson

... times, you'll come where we are lying, O worthy friend! upon our graves to wallow, That thought should give us joy ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various

... more than this which follows is the logic put into the mouth of the Lady Anne Boleyn:—From the mere enormity of the guilt imputed to me, from that very abysmal stye of incestuous adultery in which now I wallow, I challenge as of right the presumption that I am innocent; for the very reason that I am loaded in my impeachment with crimes that are inhuman, I claim to be no criminal at all. Because my indictment is revolting and monstrous, ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey

... all behind in a whispering wind As soft as a maiden's sigh, O. Or when o'er the Lakes the storm-cloud breaks, And the waves scoop their murderous hollow, While the weaker ship to its mooring must slip And safe in a harbor wallow, In the front of the storm she fills her white form, And the ...
— Soldier Songs and Love Songs • A.H. Laidlaw

... it shall be done," said the gendarme, with a smart salute. He grabbed the groveling butcher and hoisted him from his wallow. "Come along with me, Marot! I have long had my eye on thee! And is there a charge ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter

... dear, ask your uncle what sort of company he keeps, and if he is not banded with a set of loose, profligate young men, whom he calls his friends, his jolly companions, and whose chief delight is to wallow in vice, and vie with each other who can run fastest and furthest down the headlong road to the place prepared for the ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte

... until the skipper gave him the exact line to look on. Then he saw a Something that seemed to wallow darkly on a dark tumble ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman

... on the island a fortnight, and Dick had discovered the keenest joy in life to be naked. To be naked and wallow in the shallows of the lagoon, to be naked and sit drying in the sun. To be free from the curse of clothes, to shed civilisation on the beach in the form of breeches, boots, coat, and hat, and to be one with the wind and the sun and ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole

... curls." There from "Fop's Corner" rises the tipsy laugh, the prattle, and the chatter, as the dukes and lords, the wits and courtiers, practise what Dryden calls "the diving bow," or "the toss and the new French wallow"—the diving bow being especially admired, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury

... had had no shade at the first camp, and here it was good under the tangle of the mesquite, and he slept sound. He was early awakened by the ravens, whose loose, dislocated croaking came from where they sat at breakfast on the other side of the wallow. They had not suspected his presence among the mesquite, and when he stepped to the mud-hole and dipped its gummy fluid in his coffee-pot they rose hoarse and hovering, and flapped twenty yards away, and sat watching until ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister

... Mrs. Wilfer (whom the heart is loth to leave) reminds one of the only elementary ethical truth that is essential in the study of Dickens. That is that he had broad or universal sympathies in a sense totally unknown to the social reformers who wallow in such phrases. Dickens (unlike the social reformers) really did sympathise with every sort of victim of every sort of tyrant. He did truly pray for all who are desolate and oppressed. If you try to tie him to any cause narrower than that Prayer Book definition, you will find you have ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton

... rolled his vast bulk in an old Buffalo-wallow, and rearing up against a tree where the Piney Canyon quits the Graybull Canyon, he left on it his mark fully eight feet ...
— The Biography of a Grizzly • Ernest Thompson Seton

... now if I wanted to without exposing you to greater hardships than you'll have to endure here. Do you realize that it's fall, and we're in the high latitudes? This snow may not go off at all. Even if it does it will storm again before a week. You couldn't wallow through snow to your waist ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... heavier and clumsier animals than the ox, and are covered with coarser hair; they are very wild and savage, rush upon the tiger, crush, and trample him to death. They delight in those steaming marshes which are pestilential to other beings, and wallow in stagnant water. Their hide is particularly tough, their flesh hard, and their milk delicious. They are sometimes trained to be very useful, especially where rivers are apt to be swollen; for they do not fear to breast any torrent, however violent it may be in its course. They are spread ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee

... some distance, but saw nothing of his daughter. The sun was hot, and at length he came to a buffalo wallow in which some water was standing, and drank and sat down to rest. A little way off on the prairie he saw a herd of buffalo. As the man sat there by the wallow, trying to think what he might do to find his daughter, a magpie ...
— Blackfeet Indian Stories • George Bird Grinnell

... the coming shortage of men, have jumped to the conclusion that polygamy is among the probabilities of the near future. They write in terms of real or affected alarm for which there is no justification; they wallow in visions of Germany "legalising" polygamy, and see Berlin seeking recuperation, in man power by converting herself into another Salt Lake City. But I do not think that Germany, in the face of the economic ring that the Allies will certainly draw about ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells

... with smoke and disagreeable odors from below, where cooking is going on, and pigs wallow in filth in a rear apartment. The back-room of a Chinese inn is nearly always a pigsty, and a noisome place on general principles. Later in the evening a few privileged characters are permitted to come up, and the room quickly changes into a regular ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens

... deficiencies of those who love to wallow in the mire of salacious news about others, the psychologists have come to some interesting conclusions. To them it seems that there is an essential identity between the gossip and the genius. In both, the mental processes ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin

... sun at length plunged in a glare of fiery crimson and smoky purple that had all the appearance of a great atmospheric conflagration. A short, steep swell, too, gathered from the westward, causing the inert schooner to roll and wallow until she was shipping water over both gunwales, and her masts were working and grinding so furiously in the partners that we had to lift the coats and drive the wedges home afresh, as well as to get up preventer-backstays ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood

... "you will miss some sport after both our hearts. Think of it, Bunny! These fellows meet to wallow in all the latest crimes; we wallow with them as though we knew more about it than themselves. Perhaps we don't, for few criminologists have a soul above murder; and I quite expect to have the privilege of lifting the discussion into our own higher walk. They shall give their morbid minds ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung

... monotony, and often both harmonious and dignified. He could deal, and deal well, with a large range of subjects; and if he never ascends to the height of a De Flores or a Bellafront, he never descends to the depths in which both Middleton and Dekker too often complacently wallow. Unless we are to count by mere flashes, he must, I think, rank after Shakespere, Fletcher, and Jonson among his fellows; and this I say, honestly avowing that I have nothing like the enthusiasm for him that I have for Webster, or for Dekker, or ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury

... having no home but a tent in a dingle, or rather from Borrow’s fashion of making all Nature your home. Although I would have given worlds to go up and speak to him as he was tossing his clothes upon his back, I could not do it. Morning after morning did I see him undress, wallow in the sea, come out again, give me a somewhat sour look, dress, and then stride away inland at a tremendous pace, but never could I speak to him; and many years passed before I saw him again. He was ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton

... finger to abate drunkenness? Have you ever done anything to help to make it possible that the masses of our town communities should live in places better than the pigsties in which many of them have to wallow? Have you any care for the dignity, the purity, the Christianity of our civic rulers; and do you, to the extent of your ability, try to ensure that Christ's teaching shall govern the life of our cities? And the same question may be put yet more emphatically with regard ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren

... sake of shortening the distance. Yet there were other difficulties than those of the snow. The ground became rough. Now and then he would go suddenly through the treacherous snow into an old buffalo wallow or a deep gully, and no agility could keep him from falling on his face or side. This not only made him weary and sore, but it was a great trial to his temper also, and the climax came when he went through the snow into a prairie brook ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler

... they not seek the quadrature of the circle, even when on their wives? I hate that we should be enjoined to have our minds in the clouds, when our bodies are at table; I would not have the mind nailed there, nor wallow there; I would have it take place there and sit, but not lie down. Aristippus maintained nothing but the body, as if we had no soul; Zeno comprehended only the soul, as if we had no body: both of them faultily. Pythagoras, they say, followed a philosophy that was all contemplation, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne

... his hindquarters on the bank. While I was trying to pull him back, he got in his hindquarters, and then, in further answer to my efforts, sat down in the 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 ...
— The Head Hunters of Northern Luzon From Ifugao to Kalinga • Cornelis De Witt Willcox

... curious sullen look. You have only to get away from the crowd near the bathing-machines and reach one of these small coves and get your book against a rock and your pipe well alight, and you can simply wallow in misery. I have done it myself. The day when Heloise Miller went golfing with Teddy Bingley I spent the whole afternoon in one of these retreats. It is true that, after twenty minutes of contemplating the breakers, I fell asleep; but that ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse

... by such caresses as a good dog gets when his master is in the mood. That was the day before woman began to question the wisdom and goodness of man, his justice and generosity, his right to make a virtue of wallowing when he chose to wallow, and his disinterestedness and discretion when he also arrogated to himself the power to order all things. Mrs. Richardson had no more thought of questioning the beauty of her husband's decisions than ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand

... blood preserved its natural warmth even after sitting for hours in an open pulk. The boellinger, fastened around the thighs by drawing-strings of reindeer sinew, are so covered by the poesk that one becomes, for all practical purposes, a biped reindeer, and may wallow in the snow as much as he likes without the possibility of a particle getting ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor

... soul will think a more valuable liberty, by not only allowing, but encouraging them to corrupt themselves in the most scandalous manner. They consider their subjects as the farmer does the hog he keeps to feast upon. He holds him fast in his sty, but allows him to wallow as much as he pleases in his beloved filth and gluttony. So scandalously debauched a people as that of Venice is to be met with nowhere else. High, low, men, women, clergy, and laity, are all alike. The ruling nobility are no less afraid of one another than they are ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... in a large circular enclosure the towering white walls of which rose high upon every side—smooth perpendicular walls upon the sheer face of which was no slightest foothold. To his left lay a pool of water, one side of which lapped the foot of the wall at this point. It was, doubtless, the wallow and the drinking pool ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... twelve feet wide. He jumped bravely enough, but came down with a grand splash hardly more than halfway over. The water was only about a foot in depth, but the black vegetable mud half afloat was unfathomable. I managed to wallow ashore, but poor Jack sank deeper and deeper until only his head was visible in the black abyss, and his Indian fortitude was desperately tried. His foundering so suddenly in the treacherous gulf recalled the story of the Abbot ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir

... These are the "sage prairies," hundreds of miles of which exist in the central parts of the North American continent. There are prairies of sand, and "rock prairies," where the "cut-rock" and pebble deposits cover the arid plains; and still another variety, called the "hog-wallow prairies," where the surface for miles exhibits a rough appearance, as if it had been at some remote period turned ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid

... the Two Cabins, and if he would fetch it next day. At the first hint of dawn he was under way, easily following the half-obliterated trail and packing the recent snow with his webbed shoes so that the dogs should not wallow. ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London

... which, taken at the flood, would lead Seth Pecksniff on to fortune, was marked down in the table, and about to flow. No idle Pecksniff lingered far inland, unmindful of the changes of the stream; but there, upon the water's edge, over his shoes already, stood the worthy creature, prepared to wallow in the very mud, so that it slid towards ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens

... that the millions of intelligent, able-bodied Americans, who could crush the tribe of Rockefeller as elephants crush snakes, rise with each sun and dig and delve and suffer that a Rogers may wallow in wealth and an Armour gain a greater income than the Rothschilds? Why are they so easily hoodwinked into imagining that the elaborate reports detailing the immense and growing wealth of the country represent their own well-being and affluence? Because the wise men ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson

... scholarship, which passed by a score of American scholars to bestow her honours on our great American joker. And because of this love of laughter, so desperate in a serious nation, English jesters have enjoyed the uneasy privileges of a court fool. Look at poor Hood. What he really loved was to wallow in the pathetic,—to write such harrowing verses as the "Bridge of Sighs," and the "Song of the Shirt" (which achieved the rare distinction of being printed—like the "Beggar's Petition"—on cotton handkerchiefs), and the "Lady's Dream." Every time he broke from his traces, he plunged into ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier

... fit for a child to follow, Scorning the places where loose men wallow; Knowing how much he shall learn from me, I must be fair as I'd have him be; I must come home to him, day by day, Clean as ...
— All That Matters • Edgar A. Guest

... as you, Oh! ancient man, Our joyous Satyrs here: Old men are they all laughter-mad Who wallow in good cheer. Amid lush grasses soft and cool They make their feasting ground, With smilax and with bryony Their rosy pates are crowned. You see them thro' the forest trunks Great rolling gladsome shapes, Who prop themselves ...
— A Legend of Old Persia and Other Poems • A. B. S. Tennyson

... to the laity: "Some among you are like your own maccacos or monkeys amongst us who, keeping possession of anything they have stolen, will sooner suffer themselves to be taken and killed, than to let go their prey. So impure swine wallow in their filth and care ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... grunting of pigs, though in those days they called them swine, of which there were several basking in the sunshine in the little farm attached to the villa, the little herd having shortly before returned from a muddy pool, dripping and thickly coated, after a satisfying wallow, to lay themselves down to dry and sleep in peace, the mud having dried into a crackling coat of armour which protected them from ...
— Marcus: the Young Centurion • George Manville Fenn

... Mahan had an iligant pig, In the garden it loved for to wallow and dig; On potatoes it lived, and on fresh buttermilk, And its back was as smooth as fine satin or silk. Now Peter McCarthy, a graceless young scamp, Who niver would work, such a lazy young tramp, He laid eye on the pig, as he passed by one day, And the ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin

... deserted deck. For the first moment, as they hesitated there, little could be perceived other than vague shadows. The sky was overcast, but the wind light, yet with sufficient swell to the water to cause the yacht to wallow uncomfortably. West, bracing himself to the sudden plunging, managed to reach the rail. He drew back, sick at heart at the sight of the waves lapping the side almost on a level with the sloping deck on which ...
— The Case and The Girl • Randall Parrish

... said. "I came into the world handicapped—a crooked back, and a camel's desire and capacity for liquids—alcoholic liquids. I am a periodical drunkard. Every six months, or so, I am constrained by the imp within me to saturate myself with spirits and wallow in the gutter, like ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer

... anyhow, while we took Yawger's track, and at last found him browsing happily in a bare spot about a mile from our stopping place. It was two o'clock by the time we started on, floundering through the drifts in the trail of Jones and Dodds. Some drifts were so high it was all we could do to wallow through them even after the others had in a measure broken the way. After two hours of hard work in this line we came to the edge of a wide gully, where the advance party had halted. The slope was towards the south and the ground was somewhat bare, with good bunch grass, ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh

... sycophants, who had lived through the days of 1789 but knew them not. This fulsome adulation would be unworthy of notice did it not convey the most signal proof of the danger which republics incur when men lose sight of the higher aims of life and wallow among its sordid interests.[306] ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose

... creature herself, Gadabout followed the winding way, puffing along contentedly. Sometimes, when the turns were too sharp for her liking, she swung to them lazily, with a long purr of water at bow and stern, and seemed about to wallow off through the rushes. ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins

... cruel, a thing that loved evil and hated all that was joyous and good. To its ears came the ring of the laughter and the shouts of King Hrothgar's revellers, and the sweet song of the gleemen and the melody of harps filled it with fierce hatred. From its wallow in the marshes, where the pestilent grey fog hung round its dwelling, the monster, known to all men as the Grendel, came forth, to kill and to devour. Through the dark night, across the lonely moorland, it made its way, and the birds of the ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang

... with fascinated eyes,—how it rose and sailed and whirled and struggled in the air, then seemed to burst, and upward flew its light and sheen and downward dropped its dross. She glanced at the king, but he was lighting a match. She watched the dross wallow in the slime, but the sunlight fell on the back of the beggar's neck, ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois

... began to lengthen. I have no idea whether musically this air is to be considered good or bad; but it belongs to that class of art which may be best described as a brutal assault upon the feelings. Pathos must be relieved by dignity of treatment. If you wallow naked in the pathetic, like the author of "Home, sweet home," you make your hearers weep in an unmanly fashion; and even while yet they are moved, they despise themselves and hate the occasion of their weakness. It did ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson

... at war, one pulling heavenward, the other, earthward. Nor do they ever become reconciled. Either may conquer, but the vanquished never submits. The higher nature may be compelled to grovel, to wallow in the mire of sensual indulgence, but it always rebels and enters its protest. It can never forget that it bears the image of its Maker, even when dragged through the slough of sensualism. The still small voice which bids man look up is never quite ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden

... it was very soft. The result was, that while the lads stopped short, and then began to pick their way from tussock to tussock, and heather patch to patch, Solomon blundered on, made a splash here, a bit of a wallow there, and then a bound, which took him in half-way up his back; and as he plunged and struck out with fore-legs and heels, he churned up the soft bog and made it softer, so that he sank in and in, till only his spine was visible with, at the end, his long neck and great ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn

... Maker as before. The drunkard thirsted for his intoxicating cups and returned to the scenes of his former dissipations; and the profligate, who avowed himself a 'changed man,' when health was fully restored, laughed at religion as a fancy, and hastened to wallow in the mire of pollution. He had scarcely a particle of faith in sick-bed repentances, but believed that in most instances they ...
— The Hero of the Humber - or the History of the Late Mr. John Ellerthorpe • Henry Woodcock

... an' thin," he continued, "but you ban't. You'm a mean, ill-minded sawl, as would trample on your awn flesh an' blood, if you got the chance. Do your awn dirty work. Who be I that you should call on me to wallow in filth ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts

... he was a model of respectability—sacrosanct, almost. His idea of worldly happiness consisted in knowing that he was a solid, trustworthy business man, of undoubted years and discretion, whom no human being could blackmail. Now, as he fled from the odor of respectability he yearned to wallow in deviltry, to permit his soul, so long cramped in virtue, to ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne

... the Faithful, vowed to follow Old Thames's placid flow, We'll breathe of his leviathans that wallow, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 18, 1914 • Various

... goes a-tumbling through the hollow And trackless empyrean like a clown, Head pointed to the earth where weaklings wallow, Feet up toward the stars; not such renown Even our lord himself, the bright Apollo, Gets in his gilded car. For one bob down You shall behold the thing." "Right-o," I said, Clapping the old brown bay ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 14, 1914 • Various

... banks are places for enjoying the day in—no for passing the nicht. I kenna how it is; it's nane o' your wild streams that wander desolate through a desert country, like the Aven, or that come rushing down in foam and thunder, ower broken rocks, like the Foyers, or that wallow in darkness, deep, deep in the bowels o' the earth, like the fearfu' Auldgraunt; an' yet no ane o' these rivers has mair or frightfuller stories connected wi' it than the Conan. Ane can hardly saunter ower half-a-mile in its course, frae where ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous

... That thro' my waters play, If, in their random, wanton spouts, They near the margin stray; If, hapless chance! they linger lang, I'm scorching up so shallow, They're left the whitening stanes amang, In gasping death to wallow. ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... the other wore a holoku (sacque) of some lively colour. The first was uppermost, her teeth locked in her adversary's face, shaking her like a dog; the other impotently fought and scratched. So for a moment we saw them wallow and grapple there like vermin; then the mob ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson

... his long way from dust wallow to water. Here Buto, the rhinoceros, blundered blindly in his solitary majesty, while by night the great cats paced silently upon their padded feet beneath the dense canopy of overreaching trees toward the broad plain beyond, where they ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... wrought rather for the sake of praise by volunteers in toil and peril, than by men accustomed to choose pleasure in place of honour. And yet Pausanias, (64) the lover of the poet Agathon, (65) making a defence in behalf (66) of some who wallow in incontinence, has stated that an army composed of lovers and beloved would be invincible. (67) These, in his opinion, would, from awe of one another, have the greatest horror of destruction. A ...
— The Symposium • Xenophon

... round the isle I go, up stream and down, and dive and float and wallow with bliss there is no telling—till the waters all dry up and disappear, and I am left wading in weeds and mud and drift and drought and desolation, and wake up ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier

... good thing he has done—paid for it so that it could get over here where I could just wallow in it. Get down here, you heathen, take off your shoes and bow three times to the floor and then feast your eyes. You think you've seen landscapes before, but you haven't. You've only seen fifty cents' worth of good canvas spoiled by ten cents' worth ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith

... slaughtered tyrant—the fugitive after whom the true hearts of England are now following, that they may take and slay him?—'Why should your rider turn his bridle our way?' say you in your hearts; 'we will none of him; if we may help ourselves, we will rather turn us to wallow in the mire of monarchy, with the sow that was washed but newly.' Come, men of Woodstock, I will ask, and do you answer me. Hunger ye still after the flesh-pots of the monks of Godstow? and ye will say, Nay;—but wherefore, except that the pots are cracked and broken, ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott

... always invite entrance and possession. They have horizons full of splendor and beauty and music. They alone can satisfy. But the soul has not yet fully escaped from the mists and fogs and glooms of the earth. It is surrounded by those who still wallow in animalism, and the sounds of the lower world are yet echoing in its ears. But at last its face is toward the light; the far call of its destiny has been heard; it knows itself to be in a moral order; it is assured that, however closely the body may be imprisoned, no bolts and no bars can ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford

... and well kept fences told that instead of a strictly cattle grazing country, immense farms stretched from either shore. At places, corn stalks rustled for miles along the bank and fat swine came to the shore to wallow in the mud. ...
— The Story of Paul Boyton - Voyages on All the Great Rivers of the World • Paul Boyton

... earth-stopper and an anise-seed bag, a man must indeed be thoroughly blase who cannot enjoy a scamper across country, over the Pennsylvania wold, the New Jersey mere, the Connecticut moor, the Indiana glade, the Missouri brake, the Michigan mead, the American tarn, the fen, the gulch, the buffalo wallow, the cranberry marsh, the glen, the draw, the canyon, the ravine, the forks, ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye

... condition of being left in quiet possession of that which I believe to be my own. I have ruined my character. Offices of emolument are not easily obtained; but, if they were, I am not a man to be trusted. I will not live a beggar; deprived of all the blessings in which the fools around me wallow, till they turn them into curses. I wish to live happily: unmolesting, and unmolested: but, if I must either prey or be preyed upon, I am still resolved rather to act the ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft

... fringes its northern and southern banks, but to the west the prospect is open, and extends as far as the entrance to the gorge, through which the souls set forth in search of Paradise and the solar bark. Buffaloes now come to drink and wallow at midday where once floated the gilded "bari" of Osiris, and the murmur of bees from the neighbouring orchards alone breaks the silence of the spot which of old resounded with the rhythmical lamentations ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... "Don't wallow around in it," snapped Emma McChesney. "You'll only sink in deeper in your efforts to crawl out. I merely want to warn you that if you persist in this pose of tender solicitude for your doddering old mother, ...
— Personality Plus - Some Experiences of Emma McChesney and Her Son, Jock • Edna Ferber

... pulled out past Castle Cornet, and had hoisted the masts and two rather dirty sprit sails, and had run out the bowsprit and a new clean jib with a view to putting the best possible face on matters, and were beginning to catch occasional puffs of a soft westerly breeze and to wallow slowly along,—"Ee see, time's o' consekens to me and my son. We got to arn our livin'. An' Havver Gosslin's this side the island an' th' Creux's t'other side, an' th' currents round them points is ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham

... the trough and was labouring like a cask; that she would prove a heavy roller in a sea-way a single glance at her fat buttocks and swelling bilge might have persuaded me, but I never could have dreamt she would wallow so monstrously. The oscillation was rendered more formidable by her list, and there were moments when I could not keep my feet. She was shipping water very freely over her starboard rail, but this did not much concern me, for the break of the poop-deck kept the after part of the vessel ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell

... partly lies in his passionate but self-controlled nature. In the Phaedrus and Symposium love is not merely the feeling usually so called, but the mystical contemplation of the beautiful and the good. The same passion which may wallow in the mire is capable of rising to the loftiest heights—of penetrating the inmost secret of philosophy. The highest love is the love not of a person, but of the highest and purest abstraction. This abstraction is the far-off heaven on which the eye of the mind is fixed in fond amazement. The unity ...
— Symposium • Plato

... fools that in the name of art Will wallow in the mire, crying, "I fall, I fall from heaven!" fools that have only heard From earth, the murmur of those golden hooves Far, far above them. [Footnote: Alfred Noyes, At the Sign of the Golden Shoe. See also Richard Le Gallienne, The Decadent to his Soul, Proem to the Reader ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins

... minutes there was nothing but a cool, gentle breeze coming out of the southwest. We lit the lantern and tried to gather up our things, but soon realized that we could not do much that night. We found the unfortunate Snoozer crouched in a little depression which was perhaps an old buffalo wallow, but could see nothing of the horses. We concluded to go to ...
— The Voyage of the Rattletrap • Hayden Carruth

... kissed him, saying, "O soul, that knows how to disdain, blessed be she that bore thee! Arrogant, truly, upon earth was this sinner, nor is his memory graced by a single virtue. Hence the furiousness of his spirit now. How many kings are there at this moment lording it as gods, who shall wallow here, as he does, like swine in the mud, and be thought no better of by the world!" "I should like to see him smothering in it," ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt

... go somewhere to get on a long distance telephone about sending the money. Where to and how much. With the winter weather approaching, I may have to wallow through snowdrifts to get to Cheyenne, but that's a risk ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney

... drink now and then same as we do." So off the children went with the cedar bucket to the spring. When they returned they poured some of the water into the dishpan and Spotty sucked it up greedily while they hurried to pour the rest into the mudhole where the pig liked to wallow. ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas

... Student. Why, on that matter he could never be supercilious enough. How should we be other (he said) 105 than the poor devils you see, with those debasing habits we cherish? He was not to wallow in that mire, at least; he would wait, and love only at the proper time, and meanwhile put up with the Psiche-fanciulla. Now, I happened to hear of a young Greek—real Greek girl at 110 Malamocco; a true Islander, do you ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning

... much more to tell," he said, with an involuntary shudder. "It was too much for the old girl with that load in her. She began to wallow and drive toward the Wolves that I had caught a glimpse of through the scud. She hadn't got halfway there when the mainmast came down (bringing nearly everything with it) and hung over the starboard quarter, dragging the vessel down like a stoat ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams

... lies around all tired out, and likes to have the fish wallow over her; and she makes fool noises to amuse it, and pretends to chew its paws, and that makes it laugh. I have not seen a fish before that could laugh. This makes me doubt. . . . I have come to like Sunday myself. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... liberality toward religious houses in that city commonly are coupled with great and scandalous wickedness. They wallow in the bed of riches and wealth, and make their alms the coverlet to cover their loose and lascivious lives. From hence are the churches so fairly built and adorned. There are not above fifty churches and chapels, cloisters ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson

... not done. Many a man has taken a cab, on a sudden shower, merely to avoid the trouble of unrolling his umbrella, and the sanest of women has been known to cheat a 'bus conductor of a penny, so as to wallow in the gratification of a crossing-sweeper's blessing. When the philosopher asks the Everlasting Why, he knows, if he be a sound philosopher—and a sound philosopher is he who is not led into the grievous error of taking his philosophy seriously—that the question is but the starting point ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke

... there is always one thing; it will serve as a touchstone. If the admirers of Zola admire him for his pertinent ugliness and pessimism, I think they should admire this; but if, as I have long suspected, they neither admire nor understand the man's art, and only wallow in his rancidness like a hound in offal, then they will certainly be disappointed in The Ebb Tide. Alas! poor little tale, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... that if she must needs come down to wallow in her native goodiness, it is due to let me board in Kensington till my courses ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge

... high aspirations. The sting of his misery is that he has ambition but no expectation; desire for better things but no hope; pride but no energy; therefore the possession of these very qualities is an additional burden to his load of agony. Could he utterly forget his manhood, and wallow with the beasts that perish, he would be comparatively happy. But his curse is that he thinks. He is a man, and must think. He cannot always drown thought or memory. He may, and does, fly for false solace to the drink, and may stun his enemy in the evening, but it will rend him like a giant ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume III (of 6) - Orators and Reformers • Various

... joke. They swore eternal secrecy. The day was yet young and it was a glorious one. Their clothes were wet and they had to be dried before night. That settled it. They would strip, hang their clothes in the hot sun and wallow in the sand and play in the ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon

... desire. As if one had complained, that since his swearing to the covenant he could not forbear swearing, and that this sacred oath had taught him profane ones. But what holy thing is there which swine will not make mire of, for themselves to wallow in? I return; and I nothing doubt, but that this covenant, wherein all is undertaken through the grace of Christ, will make many more gracious who had grace before, and turn others, who were running on amain in the broad way, from the evil and error of their ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various



Words linked to "Wallow" :   zoom, walk on air, soar up, jump for joy, mud puddle, cloud, revel, surge, be on cloud nine, indulge, rejoice, roll, soar, enjoy, triumph, axial rotation



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