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Wrack   Listen
noun
Wrack  n.  A thin, flying cloud; a rack.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Wrack" Quotes from Famous Books



... the wind abated its rage and the thunder pealed faint with distance, while ever and anon the gloom gave place to a vague light, where, beyond the flying cloud-wrack, a faint moon peeped. ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol

... schoolboy must often have watched in aquariums the habits and manners of the common sea-horses, twisted together by their long thin bodies into one inextricable mass of living matwork, or anchored firmly with a treble serpentine coil to some projecting branch of coralline or of quivering sea-wrack. Bad swimmers by nature, utterly unarmed, and wholly undefended by protective mail, the pipe-fish generally can neither fight nor run away: and therefore they depend entirely for their lives upon their peculiar skulking and lurking habits. Their one mode of defence is not to show themselves; ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen

... of wood was getting low, but he decided that did not matter either. Even so, Ross got to his feet, moving over to the drifts of storm wrack to gather more. Why should he stay here by a useless beacon? But somehow he could not force himself to move on, as ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton

... with the fumes of sulphur. He trudged across burning lava on which his feet left their imprint; he had the appearance of a desperately dogged traveller. He penetrated into gloomy caverns into which the water of the ocean oozed drop by drop, and flowed like tears along the sea wrack, forming pools on the uneven ground where countless crustaceans increased and multiplied into hideous shapes. Enormous crabs, crayfish, giant lobsters and sea spiders crackled under the dwarfs feet, then crawled ...
— Honey-Bee - 1911 • Anatole France

... she would find herself wondering if, after all, the barque of her life had been steered by a guiding Hand, which, although it had taken her over storm-tossed seas and stranded her on lone beaches, had brought her safely, if troubled by the wrack of the waters ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte

... rudely carved out and burnt to something like the natural coloring of the bird they were intended to represent; but a large proportion of them were "sea-weed" or "spruce" decoys; that is, bunches of the weather-bound sea-wrack, or bundles of evergreen twigs, made about the shape and size of the body ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall

... may be right, and our confidence may be firm that God will give us what we ask; yet how often there is no vivid thought of Him filling the mind! How often our prayers are offered to a mere name! How seldom through the cloud-wrack beneath His feet do we see ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren

... hyperbole, "blown to atoms," had for once realised itself. There was not a visible particle of Plattner to be seen; not a drop of blood nor a stitch of clothing to be found. Apparently he had been blown clean out of existence and left not a wrack behind. Not so much as would cover a sixpenny piece, to quote a proverbial expression! The evidence of his absolute disappearance as a consequence ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells

... arms, he lashed him and clasped him, he squeezed him and shook him, so that he spilled all the dirt out of him, [8]so that the ford was defiled with his dung[8] [9]and the air was fouled with his dust[9] and an [10]unclean, filthy[10] wrack of cloud arose in the four airts wherein he was. Then from the middle of the ford Cuchulain hurled Larine far from him across through the camp [11]till he fell into Lugaid's two hands[11] at the door of the tent of his brother. [W.2252.] Howbeit [1]from that time forth[1] [2]for the remainder ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown

... locked in the embrace of a furry fiend that he had stabbed in the throat one second before the fatal hug. He told of the melting of the snows in forest rivers; of the flood that swept away the lonely traveller's encampment, and bore him, astride on a log of driftwood, five miles amid wrack and boulders on its whirling current; of deliverance through a pious Indian and his canoe, which he entered as by a miracle in mid-stream, and without upsetting any of the three. He told of long wanderings ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair

... thou hast alone the power To subdue the pains that wrack me, I admit it; but in what Thou hast said of Christian magic I, ...
— The Two Lovers of Heaven: Chrysanthus and Daria - A Drama of Early Christian Rome • Pedro Calderon de la Barca

... saved from suicide simply by the after-shine of Christianity. The religion of his fathers lingers, no longer as a creed, but as a powerful set of associations and emotions. It is a small thing to cling to amid the wrack of a man's universe; yet it holds until the appearance of a new phase in which he is to find escape from the prison-house. He has begun to realise that fear—a nameless fear of he knows not what—has taken hold upon him. "I lived in a continual, indefinite, pining fear; tremulous, ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman

... a few evenings ago, I found the young ones had flown, and as there was a cock-nest in some wrack left by the river in a bush a few yards off, I gave it a shake to see if the old ones had taken possession of it for another brood; and I was surprised to see one, and then a second young one come flying out, and a third putting out its head to reconnoitre. ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett

... a-stare; Or on a lotus leaf would crawl A brindled loach to bask and sprawl, Tasting the warm sun ere it dipped Into the water; but quick as fear Back his shining brown head slipped To crouch on the gravel of his lair, Where the cooled sunbeams, broke in wrack, Spilt shattered gold about his back. So within that green-veiled air, Within that white-walled quiet, where Innocent water thought aloud,— Childish prattle that must make The wise sunlight with laughter shake On the leafage overbowed,— ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various

... the midst of that he'pless bevy of little ones, than he stops, turns round abrupt, an' sets down on his tail; an' then upliftin' his muzzle he busts into shrieks an' yells an' howls an' cries, a complete case of dog hysterics! That's what he is, a great yeller dog; his reason is now a wrack because we ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various

... like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloudcapt Towers, the gorgeous Palaces, The solemn Temples, the great Globe itself, And all which it inherit, shall dissolve; And like this unsubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a wrack behind'; ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle

... descendants, as the King-crab (Limulus) may be said to be a transformed descendant of the otherwise quite extinct race to which Eurypterids or Sea-scorpions belonged. (c) There are altogether extinct types—lost races—which have left not a wrack behind. For there is not any representation to-day of such races as ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson

... sudden ray from the setting sun broke through the cloud-wrack and fell upon her slender figure until she glowed in the eyes of the startled spectators like a statue cut in burnished bronze. Thus illumined, as it were, by a light from heaven itself, she bowed herself beneath ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr

... death, But if thou wed my fortunes with my state, This sauing health shall suffocate my breath, To flye from them that holds my God in hate, My Mistres, Countrey, me, and my sworne fayth, Were to pull of the load from Typhons back, And crush my selfe, with shame and seruille wrack. ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, v. 7 - England's Naval Exploits Against Spain • Richard Hakluyt

... else is nought. This is solid. 'The world passeth away, ... but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.' Everything besides is show and delusion, and a life directed to it is fleeting as the cloud-wrack that sweeps across the sky, and, whether it is shone on or is black, is equally melting away. Happy the child who begins with such surrender of self to be God's instrument, and who, like Samuel, can stand up at the end and challenge ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... when Caulaincourt's despatch flashed the horrible truth upon him that he might, after all, leave France smaller and weaker than he found her. Then the lightnings of his wrath flash forth, and we see the tumult and anguish of that mighty soul: but previously the storm-wrack of passion and the cloud-bank of his clinging will are lit up by few gleams of the earlier piercing intelligence. On January the 4th he had written to Caulaincourt that the policy of England and the personal rancour of the Czar would drag Austria along. If Fortune ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose

... Alexandria. But the wind falling contrary, he was forced the next morning to put into Falmouth Haven, in Cornwall, where such and so terrible a tempest took us, as few men have seen the like, and was indeed so vehement that all our ships were like to have gone to wrack. But it pleased God to preserve us from that extremity and to afflict us only for that present with these two particulars: the mast of our Admiral, which was the Pelican, was cut overboard for the safeguard of the ship, and the Marigold was driven ashore, and somewhat bruised. ...
— Sir Francis Drake's Famous Voyage Round the World • Francis Pretty

... the huge bulk of the edifice, heaving up its dome from an obscure foundation into yet more shadowy obscurity; and by the time I reached the corner of the churchyard nearest Cheapside, the whole vast cathedral had utterly vanished, leaving "not a wrack behind," unless those thick, dark vapors were the elements of which it had been composed, and into which it had again dissolved. It is good to think, nevertheless,—and I gladly accept the analogy and the moral,—that the ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... Another wild day passed, and it was not till the evening that the weather moderated. Little by little the great seas began to calm, and the drifts of stinging rain ceased. In their wake the stars struggled through the cloud wrack, and towards morning ...
— Vandrad the Viking - The Feud and the Spell • J. Storer Clouston

... somewhat lest his mind should fail him through grievous wrack of pain of body, but that trouble ...
— Penshurst Castle - In the Days of Sir Philip Sidney • Emma Marshall

... (now Colonel) Herschel was posted, unremitting bad weather threatened to baffle his eager expectations; but during the lapse of the critical five and a half minutes the clouds broke, and across the driving wrack a "long, finger-like projection" jutted out over the margin of the dark lunar globe. In another moment the spectroscope was pointed towards it; three bright lines—red, orange, and blue—flashed out, and the problem was solved.[514] ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... looked upon this silent city, my awe grew, for the Colonel, in his gentle voice, spoke of death and wounds, of shell-shock, nerve-wrack and insanity; but he told also of wonderful cures, of miracles performed on those that should have died, and of ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol

... below the ripple where the rock breaks the surface; by the frozen shore where the land-springs lie fast, drawn into icicles or smeared in slippery slabs on the cliff faces, and hoar frost powders the black sea-wrack; on the lawns of gardens, where the winter roses linger and open dew-drenched and rain-washed in the watery sunbeams—there we see, hear, and welcome the birds that stay. Then and there we note their fewness, their lameness, and feel that they are really fellow-countrymen, ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish

... Small Porges a cheery "Good-night"—Bellew went out to walk among the roses. And, as he walked, he watched the flying wrack of clouds above his head, and listened to the wind that moaned in fitful gusts. Wherefore, having learned in his many travels to read, and interpret such natural signs and omens, he shook his head, and muttered to himself—even as ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol

... you a man who has used up the name of Waife, and who on entering the town of Gatesboro' becomes a sober, staid, and respectable personage, under the appellation of Chapman. You are Miss Chapman. Rugge and his Exhibition 'leave not a wrack behind.'" ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... undeserved suffering of the ages, all the struggles for freedom, all the efforts towards justice, all the aspirations for virtue and the wellbeing of humanity, shall absolutely vanish, and, "like the baseless fabric of a vision, leave not a wrack behind." ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace

... whatsoever. I've been trying to get her to come home for the last fortnight, but she just won't leave off going around with the sailors. The whole beach is ashamed of her. It's general talk down below. What can I do? The little old coral house is going to wrack and ruin and the baby ain't been properly took care of since she left. What am I going to do, madam? What am I going to ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.

... thresh your rigs, Nor kick your rickles aff their legs, Sendin' the stuff o'er muirs an' haggs Like drivin' wrack; But may the tapmast grain that ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... calm or wrack-wreath, whether by dark or day, I heave them whole to the conger or rip their plates away, First of the scattered legions, under a shrieking sky, Dipping between the rollers, the English ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling

... intimate acquaintance with the sea-wrack, crabs, sea-nettles, jelly-fish, and the thousand and one other small creatures that inhabit the ocean, dates from this ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti

... for upon the night of the 11th we fairly entered upon that por- tion of the Atlantic which is known as the Sargasso Sea. An extensive tract of water is this, inclosed by the warm current of the Gulf Stream, and thickly covered with the wrack, called by the Spaniards "sargasso," the abundance of which so seriously impeded the progress of Columbus's vessel on ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne

... and the city-elders taught me. First I reproach you both sides equally That when at Pylae and Olympia, At Pytho and the many other shrines That I could name, you sprinkle from one cup The altars common to all Hellenes, yet You wrack Hellenic cities, bloody Hellas With deaths of her own sons, while yonder clangs The gathering ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes

... fox who was standing all alone, watching, with oblique eyes, the two great birds fast dissolving with every desperate, stampeding wing-beat into the hurrying cloud-wrack and the wild seascape—in opposite directions. He had made a good stalk, but had sprung a little ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars

... I got to the quay to take a boat to the yacht; for, as I calculated, that would leave me a full hour to the time appointed for sailing. Judge, then, of my amazement when I saw her standing out, the smoke-wrack flying abaft, and trudging steadily for the mouth of the harbour. I stood there, I think, fully three minutes before I moved or took action, but during that space of time I had jumped at the conclusion. ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson

... field and mead, The rounding noon hangs hard and white; Into the gathering heats recede The hollows of the Chelsea height; But under all to one quiet tune, A spirit in cool depths withdrawn, With logs, and dust, and wrack bestrewn, The stately ...
— Lyrics of Earth • Archibald Lampman

... which hangs on the horizon like a low silver cloud above the faint haze of the summer sea. Below lie Sillery Sands, and the caves of the beach; beyond, the opening heights of Exmoor, in long flat curves, featureless, spacious, and beautiful, purple and sombre under the wrack of rain-clouds, grey and arid in the fierce blaze of the midsummer sun, most lovely of all on crisp September mornings, when the heather is abloom in miles on miles of changing purples and the air has a ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland

... fear was on the seaport towns, The weight of his hand held hard the downs. And the merchants cursed him, bitter and black, For a red flame in the sea-fog's wrack Was all of their ships ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet

... o'er many a track Of his old life-toil free; The enchanted calm, the fiery wrack, Far ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various

... from the heap, like smoke from an extinguished fire; and ever, as we looked, spars and splinters of brick tore away from the high fragment yet standing, and plunged with a thud into the wrack underneath. ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes

... by the power of the King, Enforced was she to wed him in her tears, And with a shameful swiftness: afterward, Not many moons, King Uther died himself, Moaning and wailing for an heir to rule After him, lest the realm should go to wrack. And that same night, the night of the new year, By reason of the bitterness and grief That vext his mother, all before his time Was Arthur born, and all as soon as born Delivered at a secret postern-gate To Merlin, ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson

... course, this was another postponement of Mrs. Benton's own meal, but she didn't mind that, so long as she had an opportunity to deal with the small lads. Explaining to them, as she undressed and bathed them: "You'd go to wrack and ruin if 'twasn't for me takin' a hand in your upbringin' now and then. You pull the wool over Gabriella's eyes the worst ever was. My! What you doing now, ...
— Jessica, the Heiress • Evelyn Raymond

... Anselm lives in ev'ry page, And sits archbishop still, to vex the age. Had he foreseen—and who knows but he did?— This fatal wrack, which deep in time lay hid, 'Tis but just to believe, that little hand Which clouded him, but now benights our land, Had never—like Elias—driv'n him hence, A sad retirer for a slight offence. For were he now, like the returning year, Restor'd, to view these desolations here, ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan

... winds, blow free - Blow all my ships safe home to me! But if thou sendest some a-wrack, To never more come sailing back, Send any—all that skim the sea, But bring my ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... Isaiah says, the fruit of justice is quietness and assurance for ever! And last, but not least, my friends, is it not a sign, a sign not to be mistaken, of God's good- will and mercy to us, that now, at this very time of all others, when almost every country in Europe is going to wrack and ruin through the folly and wickedness of their kings and rulers, He should have given us here in England a Queen who is a pattern of goodness and purity, in ruling not only the nation, but her ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley

... granted us peace and plenty, and the quiet we've sought so long; He hath thwarted the wily savage, and kept him from wrack and wrong; And unto our feast the Sachem shall be bidden, that he may know We worship his own Great Spirit, who maketh the ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck

... long time I stood in the shadow of the window curtains staring out upon a moon hidden ever and anon in flying cloud-wrack; but at last I turned and wandered away with some vague idea of finding Anthony, and as I went, the lights and glitter, the sounds of voices and laughter grew ever more distasteful, and turning my back on it all, I found my way into a wide corridor. ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol

... my lovely boy, who in thy power Dost hold Time's fickle glass, his sickle, hour; Who hast by waning grown, and therein show'st Thy lovers withering as thy sweet self grow'st; If Nature, sovereign mistress over wrack, As thou goest onwards, still will pluck thee back, She keeps thee to this purpose, that her skill May time disgrace and wretched minutes kill. Yet fear her, O thou minion of her pleasure! She may detain, but not still keep, her treasure: Her ...
— Testimony of the Sonnets as to the Authorship of the Shakespearean Plays and Poems • Jesse Johnson

... but veered as much to the south, he might have chanced the run through Concepcion Strait, or even weathered Duke of York Island. He nodded to his junior, whose presence on the bridge was a mere matter of form, owing to the powerless condition of the ship and the impenetrable wrack of foam and mist that barred vision ahead, and strode off on a tour of inspection. As wind and sea were now beating more directly on the port side, there was some degree of shelter along the covered-in deck ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy

... of the offences and defences, that may chance in each of the forenamed. We have formerly said that it is necessary for a Prince to have good foundations laid; otherwise it must needs be that he go to wrack. The Principal foundations that all States have, as well new, as old, or mixt, are good laws, and good armes; and because there cannot be good laws, where there are not good armes; and where there are good armes, there must needs be good ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli

... mine had been sprung beneath the spot upon which had been dumped her emotions of the last two months, blowing some to atoms, bringing to light others that had lain buried. Out of the wrack, joy, shame, fear fell at her feet—and a sentence out of a letter was staring her in ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates

... back, giving herself up to the sensuous pleasure of the perfectly hung car, and the rapid movement through the summer air. Wythburn and Thirlmere were soon passed; leaving them just time to notice the wrack and ruin which Manchester has made of the once lovely shore of Thirlmere, where hideous stretches of brown mud, and the ruins of long submerged walls and dwellings, reappear with every dry summer to fling reproach in the face of ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... Rocks [63]was sheltered from the Wind, so that we had opportunity to land our selves, (though almost drowned) in all four persons, besides the Negro: when we were got upon the Rock, we could perceive the miserable Wrack to our great terrour, I had in my {{9 }} pocket a little Tinder-box, and Steel, and Flint to strike fire at any time upon occasion, which served now to good Purpose, for its being so close, preserved the Tinder dry, with this, and the help ...
— The Isle Of Pines (1668) - and, An Essay in Bibliography by W. C. Ford • Henry Neville

... while they wondered, The battle-wrack was sundered; To Victory they thundered, But . . ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service

... cast their burdens down on the broad plain of al-Ghabit, as a trader from al-Yaman unfolds from the bales his store; And the topmost crest, on the morrow, of al-Mujaimir's cairn, was heaped with the flood-borne wrack, like wool on ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... though to your conquering eyes Love owes its chiefest victories, And borrows those bright arms from you With which he does the world subdue; Yet you yourselves are not above The empire nor the griefs of love. Then wrack not lovers with disdain, Lest love on you revenge their pain; You are not free, because you're fair, The boy did not his mother spare: Though beauty be a killing dart, It is no armour ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 387, August 28, 1829 • Various

... rest. So lovely-fair was Hero, Venus' nun, As Nature wept, thinking she was undone, Because she took more from her than she left, And of such wondrous beauty her bereft: Therefore, in sign her treasure suffer'd wrack, Since Hero's time hath half the world been black. Amorous Leander, beautiful and young, (Whose tragedy divine Musaeus sung,) Dwelt at Abydos; since him dwelt there none For whom succeeding times make greater moan. His dangling tresses, that were never shorn, Had they been cut, and unto ...
— Hero and Leander and Other Poems • Christopher Marlowe and George Chapman

... to watch the flower set up its face. I loathe the trembling shimmer of the sea, Its heaving roods of intertangled weed And orange sea-wrack with its necklace fruit; The stale, insipid cadence of the dawn, The ringdove, tedious harper on five tones, The eternal havoc of the sodden leaves, Rotting ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton

... read, it was evident that she was fast regaining the use of the treasures stored in her brain by years of dogged and methodical work. But the facts and personalities which had made her own life seemed to have vanished, leaving "not a wrack behind." ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods

... lightnings played around the rocks near the camp: a storm came up and seemed to part in two, one half going north and the other south; but just before daybreak we were awakened by a crash of thunder that seemed to split the hills; and we heard the wrack as though the earth and sky would mingle; but only a few drops of rain fell, too little to leave any water, even on the surface of the flat rocks close to the camp. This is certainly an extraordinary climate. I do not believe a week ever passes without a ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles

... shall walk no more through the sodden plain With the faded bents o'erspread, We shall stand no more by the seething main While the dark wrack drives overhead; We shall part no more in the wind and the rain, Where thy last farewell was said; But perhaps I shall meet thee and know thee again When the ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow

... the Helvetii rallied, To save themselves from wrack, And from the towns they sallied, And drove the Romans back. The land was quite mounTAINous, Yet they were put to flight; And Titus Labienus Was stationed on ...
— Hildegarde's Neighbors • Laura E. Richards

... confidence of distinguished commanders. He had looked upon the strangeness and beauty of the world in its most remote and least-known quarters, had witnessed fights with savages, threaded unmapped straits, and had, to crown his youthful achievements, striven amidst the wrack and thunder of grim-visaged war. We may picture his welcome: the strong grasp of his father's hand, the crowding enthusiasm of his brother and sisters fondly glorying in their hero's prowess. The warnings of uncle John were all forgotten now. When the midshipman's younger brother, ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott

... the Kills the muskets crack— "Ha! ha!" Lord Herman waves his beaver: "Die of thy spleen ere I come back, Old Stuyvesant!" With a noise of wrack The fort blew up of his aggriever!— But ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend

... invincible in love. Love? Do I not know it? Can I not understand how that splendid fighting animal, Antony, quartered the globe with his sword and pillowed his head between the slim breasts of Egyptian Cleopatra while that hard-won world crashed to wrack and ruin? ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London

... goal, as the ulterior motive, as the actual purpose of his journey? To be wrecked here, this was also a goal:—Bene navigavi cum naufragium feci {HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} and he translated the "Ring" into Schopenhauerian language. Everything goes wrong, everything goes to wrack and ruin, the new world is just as bad as the old one:—Nonentity, the Indian Circe beckons {HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} Brunnhilda, who according to the old plan had to retire with a song in honour of free love, consoling the world with the hope of a socialistic ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.

... as neat as old Dame Safford herself, and was continually "straightening things out," as she called it. Her temper, like her hair, was somewhat fiery; and when her work did not suit her, she was prone to a gloomy view of life. If she was to be believed, things were always "going to wrack and ruin" about the house; and she had a queer way of taking time by the forelock. In the morning it was "going on to twelve o'clock," and at noon it was "going ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn

... had blown over, but the moon was every now and then obscured by masses of scurrying cloud-wrack, and in these periods of semi-darkness Doomsman and Stockader were hardly to be told apart. So closely packed was the scrimmage that the use of any missile weapon was impossible. The dagger and the night-stick ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen

... one knew ... But there was something between these two, Maggie and Aunt Anne. Every one felt it and longed for the storm to burst. Bad enough things outside with Mr. Warlock dead, members leaving right and left, and the Chapel generally going to wrack and ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole

... down of the sun thereafter, the mother of the changeling went to the edge of the sea, and stood among the wet tangle of the wrack, [Footnote: Wrack: coarse seaweed.] and put out her supplicating hands, but never spoke ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker

... he had gone a hundred yards, he lost his first zest in the adventure. The darkness had thickened; and the vagrant wind-gusts had tightened into a steady gale; a gale which carried before it a blinding wrack of ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune

... thou hast been so slack To wound her heart whose eyes have wounded me And suffered her to glory in my wrack, Thus to my aid I lastly conjure thee! By hellish Styx, by which the Thund'rer swears, By thy fair mother's unavoided power, By Hecate's names, by Proserpine's sad tears, When she was wrapt to the infernal bower! By thine own loved Psyche, ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Idea, by Michael Drayton; Fidessa, by Bartholomew Griffin; Chloris, by William Smith • Michael Drayton, Bartholomew Griffin, and William Smith

... nay; I look'd for Jamie back; But the wind it blew high, and the ship it was a wrack; His ship it was a wrack—Why didna Jamie dee? Or why do I live to cry, ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various

... Abiding wrack and scaith! O Faith that meets ten thousand cheats Yet drops no jot of faith! Devil and brute Thou dost transmute To higher, lordlier show, Who art in sooth that lovely ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell

... his credit be. And hath my father from his tender youth Vouchsaf'd to bring thee up? did I therefore Believe so earnestly thy perjur'd truth, Advancing still thine honour evermore, That, not contented with a common wrack, Thou shouldst intend the ruin of us all; And when thou seemd'st afraid to turn thy back, To make a glory of our greater fall? Before thou triumph in thy treachery, Before thou 'scape untouched for thy sin, Let never Fates nor Fortune favour me, But wretched let me live and die ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VI • Robert Dodsley

... Kelpware, or Our Lady's Wrack, is found on most of our sea coasts in heavy brown masses of coarse-looking Sea Weed, which cover, and shelter many small algae. Kelp is an impure carbonate of soda containing sulphate, and chloride of ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie

... were I a wench, t'had bin my case, for nature heere, made both her ioy and woe, And spight that (but herself) commendeth none, Of force must say, this was a rarer one Then either nature did, or ere shall make, whose life holdes vp her age, whose deathe's her wrack. ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale

... something more than an aggregation of atoms. The body dissolves into its constituent elements and serves in its turn to build up other organisms: but as a human body it all turns to dust nor 'leaves a wrack behind'. Thus Darwinism was made the basis first for a materialistic, and then for a monistic, view of the world, and hence came to be rigorously opposed to every form of Theism. But since, at that time, Darwinism was the only ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert

... herself had received with rapture the strange rites of Nilotic and of Syrian superstition. Alexandria was the forge of fanciful imaginations, the majority of which were destined to pass like vapours and leave not a wrack behind, while a few fastened with the force of dogma on the conscience of awakening Christendom. During Hadrian's reign it was still uncertain which among the many hybrid products of that motley age would live and flourish; and the Emperor, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... mate, coolly, "since you've worked yourself up so much over the matter, and as we're a-goin' along on our course agin, as I suggested to the skipper afore we raised the wrack"—here he went to the pantry and brought out a bottle, and ...
— Mr. Trunnell • T. Jenkins Hains

... on his horse, by different way The country scowers, to make more spoil and wrack: That palfrey never more tastes corn or hay; So that few days exhaust the famished hack. But not afoot does fierce Orlando stray, Who will not, while he lives, conveyance lack. As many as he finds, so many steeds — Their masters slain — ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto

... happiness! Wretched beyond an unutterable woe! And none knew! What was she to pray for? To what purpose and end ought she to steel herself? Ought she to hope, or ought she to despair? "O God, help me!" she kept whispering to Jehovah whenever the heavenly vision shone through the wrack of her meditation. "O God, help me!" She had a conscience that, when it was in the mood for severity, could be unspeakably ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett

... And now I have told you his right name, I pray you, fair lady, let me go to my lord again, for he will never out of this country until that he have me again. And if he be angry he will do much harm or that he be stint, and work you wrack in this country. As for that threatening, said Sir Gringamore, be it as it be may, we will go to dinner. And so they washed and went to meat, and made them merry and well at ease, and because the Lady Lionesse of the castle was ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume I (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory

... na, and I look'd for Jamie back; But hard blew the winds, and his ship was a wrack; The ship was a wrack—why didna Jamie dee? Or why am I spared to cry, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... dissolution, breaking up; diruption^, disruption; consumption; disorganization. fall, downfall, devastation, ruin, perdition, crash; eboulement [Fr.], smash, havoc, delabrement [Fr.], debacle; break down, break up, fall apart; prostration; desolation, bouleversement [Fr.], wreck, wrack, shipwreck, cataclysm; washout. extinction, annihilation; destruction of life &c 361; knock-down blow; doom, crack of doom. destroying &c v.; demolition, demolishment; overthrow, subversion, suppression; abolition &c (abrogation) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... guilty of thy honour's wrack; Yet for thy honour did I entertain him; Coming from thee, I could not put him back, For it had been dishonour to disdain him: Besides, of weariness he did complain him, And talk'd of virtue: O unlook'd-for evil, When virtue is ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]

... the captain peered out through the dense wrack and haze. A great dark cliff loomed out upon the left, jagged, inhospitable, ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle

... a huge tumbled wrack of molten cloud like the ruins of some vast temple of the gods of eld. Chasmed buttresses, battlements overthrown; on the horizon a press of giants, shoulder against shoulder, climbing slowly to the rescue; in mid-sky a praying woman; farther ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 1, January, 1891 • Various

... an ideal place for sea-fishing, for the great deep pool was free from rocks save those which surrounded it, and not a thread of weed or wrack to be seen ready to entangle their lines or catch their hooks; while they knew from old experience that it was the sheltered home of large shoals, which sought it as a sanctuary from the seals or large fish which ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn

... therefore the first objective of every expanding movement, whether commercial or political, setting out from the adjacent coasts. Such islands are swept by successive waves of conquest or colonization, and they carry in their people and language evidences of the wrack left behind on their shores. This has been the history of Aegina, Cyprus, Rhodes, Crete, Malta, Corfu, Sicily and Sardinia. That of Cyprus is typical. It was the first island base for the ancient Tyrian fleets, and had its Phoenician settlements in 1045 B. C. From that time it was one of ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple

... wrack behind," moaned Anne Linton, closing her eyes. "But you are wrong, Miss Arden—I shall not eat it, I shall gulp it—the way a dog does. I always wondered why a dog has no manners about eating. I know now. He is so hungry his eyes eat it first, so his mouth has no chance. Well, I'm certainly ...
— Red Pepper's Patients - With an Account of Anne Linton's Case in Particular • Grace S. Richmond

... and Sarlaboys to her. This, this the greatest, and to this one compard All that are past but trifles. Oh that grand maister Of mechall[90] lusts, that bulke of brothelree, That stillary of all infectious sinnes, Hath scapt the wrack, and with his fellowe guest And partner in corruption makes this waye, And with no tarde pace. Where shall I hyde mee! Whether shall I fly to Palestra back And with this sadd relation kill her quite That's scarce ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen

... mind their awfish(3) skreekin', They 'tice folk to their death; Then ride aboon yon billows An' gloor at them beneath. They gloor at eenless corpses Slow driftin' wi' the tide, Deep doon amang the weedy wrack, Wheer ...
— Songs of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman

... drafted by a much lesser man than Shakspere, and that without ever having heard of Bruno or the theory of the indestructibility of matter. There is nothing in the case approaching to a reproduction of Bruno's far-reaching thought; while on the contrary the "leave not a wrack behind," in the TEMPEST, is an expression which sets aside, as if it were unknown, the conception of an endless transmutation of matter, in a context where the thought would naturally suggest itself to one who had met with ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson

... {143b} To my best remembrance, he lay crying out all one night for fear, and at times he would so tremble, that he would make the very bed shake under him. {143c} But, Oh! how the thoughts of Death, of Hell-fire, and of eternal Judgment, did then wrack his conscience. Fear might be seen in his face, and in his tossings to and fro: It might also be heard in his words, and be understood by his heavy groans. He would often cry, I am undone, I am undone; my ...
— The Life and Death of Mr. Badman • John Bunyan

... lads whose hearts were stout and true. And when in the time of trial you hear the recreant say, Shooting his coward lips at us, "You shall have had your day: For all your state and glory shall pass like a cloudy wrack, And here some other flag shall fly where flew the Union Jack,"— Why tell him a hundred thousand men would spring from these sleepy farms, To tie that flag in its ancient place with the sinews of their arms; And if they doubt you and put you to scorn, why you can make it plain, ...
— Lundy's Lane and Other Poems • Duncan Campbell Scott

... allus say, Is des' befo' de dawn, But it's moughty ha'd a-waitin' Were de night goes frownin' on; An' it's moughty ha'd a-hopin' When de clouds is big and black, An' all de t'ings you's waited fu' Has failed, er gone to wrack— But des' keep on a joggin' ind a little bit o song. De moon is allus brightah ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz

... hast thought in thy folly that the Gods have friends and foes, That they wake, and the world wends onward, that they sleep, and the world slips back, That they laugh, and the world's weal waxeth, that they frown and fashion the wrack: Thou hast cast up the curse against me; it shall aback on thine head; Go back to the sons of repentance, with the children of sorrow wed! For the Gods are great unholpen, and their grief is seldom seen, And the wrong that they will and ...
— The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby

... that I could get on by myself; but still, Edward, you know we cannot tell what a day may bring forth, and I might fall sick, or something happen which might prevent my attending to anything; and then, without you or Pablo, everything might have gone to wrack and ruin. Certainly, when we think how we were left, by the death of old Jacob, to our own resources, we have much to thank God for in ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat

... to wrack every fibre of my brain—was, what were they after? The Chinese gentleman in the flamboyant pyjamas had without doubt, repaired to his compatriots in the galley, forward: at that moment they were, of course, holding some unholy conference. Were they going to murder ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher

... staff in daisied lanes. For over me burned lustrous the dear eyes Of my beloved; I strove as at a joust To gain at end the guerdon of her smile. And ever, as in the dense melee I dashed, Her name burst from my lips, as lightning breaks Out of the plunging wrack of summer storms. ...
— Pike County Ballads and Other Poems • John Hay

... between one and two; the moon (as I have said) was down; a strongish wind, carrying a heavy wrack of cloud, had set in suddenly from the west; and we began our movement in as black a night as ever a fugitive or a murderer wanted. The whiteness of the path guided us into the sleeping town of Broughton, thence through Picardy, and beside my old acquaintance ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... rash that we reached the place, to find it must have been the house of the collector of the district; but it was all one wrack and ruin—glass, tables, and chairs smashed; hangings and carpets burnt or ragged to pieces, and in one or two places, blood-stains on the white floor, told a terrible tale of what had taken place not ...
— Begumbagh - A Tale of the Indian Mutiny • George Manville Fenn

... at least in maidens' hearts, of the nature of an intermittent fever. The tide of Solway flows, but the more rapid his flow the swifter his ebb. The higher it brings the wrack up the beach, the deeper, six hours after, are laid bare the roots of the seaweed upon the shingle. Now Winsome Charteris, however her heart might conspire against her peace, was not at all the girl to be won before she was asked. Also there was that ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett

... glasses high! Let them with the champagne tremble, Like the loose wrack in the sky, When the four wild winds assemble! Here 's to all the love on earth, (Love, the young man's, wise man's treasure!) Drink, and fill your throats with mirth! Drink, and drown ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various

... once more, the strangely intimate companionship of the sea. He glanced down into the water whose uneven floor was diapered with long weedy patches, fragments of fallen rock, and brighter patches of sand; he inhaled the pungent odour of sea-wrack and listened to the breathings of the waves. They lapped softly against the rounded boulders which strewed the shore like a flock of nodding Behemoths. He remembered his visits at daybreak to the beach—those unspoken confidences with the sunlit element to whose friendly caresses he had abandoned ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas

... ancient fishers once lay side by side On piled-up sea-wrack in their wattled hut, Its leafy wall their curtain. Near them lay The weapons of their trade, basket and rod, Hooks, weed-encumbered nets, and cords and oars, And, propped on rollers, an infirm old boat. Their pillow ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus

... wield; an unlopp'd trunk it was, and huge, Still rough—like those which men in treeless plains 410 To build them boats fish from the flooded rivers, Hyphasis deg. or Hydaspes, deg. when, high up deg.412 By their dark springs, the wind in winter-time Hath made in Himalayan forests wrack, deg. deg.414 And strewn the channels with torn boughs—so huge 415 The club which Rustum lifted now, and struck One stroke; but again Sohrab sprang aside, Lithe as the glancing deg. snake, and the club came deg.418 Thundering to earth, ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold

... the ground swam like a loch, and from the hill-side came the rumour of a thousand swollen streams. That, with the heavy drip of laden branches, made sound enough, but after the thunder and the downpour it seemed silence itself. Presently when I looked up I saw that the black wrack was clearing from the sky, and through a gap ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan

... train rushed swiftly through the dimly-lighted suburbs of London, and entered upon the open country. A wan, watery line of light lay under the brooding clouds in the west, tinged with a lurid hue; and all the great field of sky stretching above the level landscape was overcast with storm-wrack, fleeing swiftly before the wind. At times the train seemed to shake with the Wast, when it was passing oyer any embankment more than ordinarily exposed; but it sped across the country almost as rapidly ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton

... I be gardener now, too: yaaes I be, to save the wages. And he's gone clean mazed about that garden—yaaes, I think. Would yue believe this, Maaester Harry, that he killed every one o' the blessed strawberries last year with a lot o' wrack from the bache, because he said it wued be as good for ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various

... are not of vegetable origin, there are many which are most useful, not to say indispensable to the taxidermist. Leaving out the foreign corals, sea-fans, sponges, etc, we shall certainly find the most useful English species to be first: the broad leaved horn-wrack (Flustra foliacia), that mass of thin hand-like leaves, of the colour of brown paper, which is cast up on some shores, often in great quantities. Other useful sorts are those like little trees, such as the common sea fir (Sertularia, ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne

... the affinities of Calamites and Lepidodendron (supposing that they are found in situ with Sigillaria) are so CLEAR, that they could not have been marine, like, but in a greater degree, than the mangrove and sea- wrack, and I will humbly apologise to you and all Botanists for having let my mind run riot on a subject on which assuredly I know nothing. But till I hear this, I shall keep privately to my own opinion with the same pertinacity and, as you will ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin

... Bliss). "Properest," for "perfectest motion." After "a-foot." "It hath its tempests like the sea, and as violent, and men are ship-wrack't upon pillars like great rocks." And at the end after "could not"—"ffinally it is used for a church of these two only, sharkes and cut purses, the one comes thither to fast, the other ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle

... allayed all anxiety, he explained how, as the Germans advanced upon any point, we should retire upon our base. As for the actual field-work, with one gesture he swept the whole battle-line into the distance, and you saw it as an infinitely receding tide that left its wrack strewn on a place of peace where the ambulance wandered at its will, secure from danger. The whole thing was done with such compelling and convincing enthusiasm that Ursula Dearmer's mother adopted more and more the humble attitude of a mere woman who has ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair

... can help it, Sir John; but a craft that is foreordained to be a wrack, will be a wrack, in spite of reefing and bracing. Look ahead, you Dick Lion—ay, there you ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper

... Spanish Armado to wrack, And Travell'd all o'er the old World, and came back, In his old Ship, laden with Gold and old Sack, Like an ...
— Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Vol. 5 of 6 • Various

... hang full and dark—a wrack sails from the west. Peace, peace, Banshee—"keening" at every window. The storm did not cease till the Atlantic was strewn with wrecks. Peace, be still! Oh, a thousand weepers, praying in agony on waiting shores, listened for that voice; but when the sun ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.

... Yet am I Suffolk and the cardinal's broker. Hume, if you take not heed, you shall go near To call them both a pair of crafty knaves. Well, so its stands; and thus, I fear, at last Hume's knavery will be the duchess' wrack, And her attainture will be Humphrey's fall. Sort how it will, I shall have ...
— King Henry VI, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]

... the unclosing buds of April brought no awakening; lethargy fettered all, arresting vigour, sapping desire. An immense inertia chained progress in its tracks, while overhead the gray storm-wrack fled away,—misty, monstrous, gale-driven before ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers

... brake in twa, when she kenned the Cause's fa', And she sleeps where there's never nane shall waken, Where the glen lies a' in wrack, wi' the houses toom and black, And her father's ...
— New Collected Rhymes • Andrew Lang

... is; and what a quantity of sea-weed," said Ellen Herbert; and, indeed, it was not easy to move over the broken cliffs, since the accumulation of wrack made ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope

... such lawless actions, and it was because the pulpiteers, Methuen, Willock, Douglas, and the rest, were again "put at," after being often suffered to go free, that the final crash came, and the Reformation began in the wrack and ruin of monasteries ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang

... are lost: Not a pillar nor a post In his Croisic keeps alive the feat as it befell; Not a head in white and black On a single fishing smack, 130 In memory of the man but for whom had gone to wrack All that France saved from the fight whence England bore the bell. Go to Paris: rank on rank. Search, the heroes flung pell-mell On the Louvre, deg. face and flank! deg.135 You shall look long enough ere you come to Herve Riel. So, for better and for worse, Herve Riel, ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning

... their Souldiers to eschew the sack, Gainst their owne Battell bearing in their flight, By their owne French are strongly beaten back: Lest they their Ranks, should haue disord'red quight, So that those men at Armes goe all to wrack Twixt their owne friends, and those with whom they fight, Wherein disorder and destruction seem'd To striue, which ...
— The Battaile of Agincourt • Michael Drayton

... huge and black, She crushed our ribs in her iron grasp! Down went the Cumberland all a wrack, With a sudden shudder of death, And the cannon's breath For her ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various

... on the rocks a thousand feet below. The sea-gulls screamed about his head, the sea-lions barked with the hollow note of consumptives on the outlying rocks. On the horizon was a bank of fog, outlined with the crests and slopes and gulches of the mountain beside him. It sent an advance wrack scudding gracefully across the ocean to puff among the redwoods, capriciously clinging to some, ignoring others. Then came the vast white mountain rushing over the roaring ocean, up the cliffs and into the gloomy forests, ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... been wildly boisterous, but now the wind had dropped, only its rags went fluttering through the night. The rays of the full moon fell in a shower between the branches. Overhead still raced the scud and wrack, shaped like hurrying monsters; but below the earth was quiet. Still and dripping stood the hosts of trees. Their trunks gleamed wet and sparkling where the moon caught them. There was a strong smell of mould and fallen leaves. The air ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood

... may rail at town land till all have gone to wrack, The very straws may wrangle till they've thrown down the stack; The very door-posts bicker till they've pulled in the door, The very ale-jars jostle till the ale is on the floor, But ...
— The Green Helmet and Other Poems • William Butler Yeats

... said na, for I looked for Jamie back; But hard blew the winds, and his ship was a wrack; His ship was a wrack! Why didna Jamie dee? Or why was I spared to cry, Wae ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various

... nasty chopping sea; which, save in the sullen green hollows of the waves, was dead and lead-coloured as far as the eye could reach—as leaden, indeed, as the heavy grey sky overhead, where some fleecy floating clouds of lighter wrack, rapidly drifting across the darker background that lined the horizon all round, made the latter of a deeper tone by contrast, besides acting as the avant courier of a fresh squall—the wind just then tearing and shrieking through the rigging in short angry gusts and then sighing as it wailed away ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson

... saw ye, Grand Prophets old? What pristine years? What advents manifold? When first the glaciers in their icy throes Were grinding thy repasts; and feeding thee with snows? What earthquake shocks? What changes of the sun? While ye laughed down their wrack and builded on! ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various

... had all his fortune felt a wrack, Had that false servant sped in safety back? This night his treasured heaps he meant to steal, And what a fund ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett

... Abydos, which has vanished and left no wrack behind, rose once in this spot where we now stand, on the very threshold of the solitudes; but its necropoles, more venerated even than those of Memphis, and its thrice-holy temples, are a little farther on, in the marvellously conserving sand, which has buried them under its tireless waves and ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti

... at the thunder's crack; I tremble not at noise of war; I swound not at the news of wrack; I shrink not at a blazing star; I fear not loss, I hope not gain, I ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin

... persuasions in the world. Rough rigour looks out right, and still prevails: Smooth mildness looks too many ways to thrive. Wherefore, since Mordred's crimes have wrong'd the laws In so extreme a sort, as is too strange, Let right and justice rule with rigour's aid, And work his wrack at length, although too late; That damning laws, so damned by the laws, He may receive his deep deserved doom. So let it fare with all that dare the like: Let sword, let fire, let torments be their end. Severity upholds ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne

... at two leagues' distant it was not visible from the look-out, was discovered in latitude 15 degrees 50 minutes, and 148 degrees 10 minutes longitude. The constant recurrence of breakers, trunks of trees in large quantities, fruits and sea wrack, and the smoothness of the sea, all indicated the neighbourhood of extensive land to the south-east. It was New Holland. Bougainville determined to leave these dangerous latitudes, where he was likely to meet with nothing but barren ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne

... eyes, is a rarer phenomenon. And it seems to be occurring whenever a string of Laraghmenians come plodding up their winding mountain-path under the burden of heavy creels filled with earth, or oftener with slippery brown sea-wrack and leathery weed. For it is in this way that whatever scanty foothold their starveling crops may find, has been fashioned and maintained in the stony little fields. Year by year, as the blustery days of late autumn ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane

... up early to a fair dawn. The cloud-wrack was blown off, leaving the sky a lake of burnt yellow, pure, sweet, and cool. Thus the world entered upon the summer of Saint Luke, to a new-risen sun, to thin mists stealing off the moor, to wet flowers hearted anew, to blue ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett

... Nay, an this were all, 'twere something; but they are the only known enemies to my generation. A fasting-day no sooner comes, but my lineage goes to wrack; poor cobs! they smoak for it, they are made martyrs O' the gridiron, they melt in passion: and your maids to know this, and yet would have me turn Hannibal, and eat my own flesh and blood. My princely coz, [pulls out a red herring] fear nothing; I have not the ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson

... load altogether. Oh, the careful limits which Christian people nowadays set to their work for Jesus! They are not afraid of being tired in their pursuit of business or pleasure, but in regard to Christ's work they will let anything go to wrack and ruin rather than that they should turn a hair, by persevering efforts to prevent it. Work to the limit of power if you live in the light ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren

... cooler, with a sighing wind, and in the west a thickening wrack of clouds. It was very dark. The restless and multitudinous flicker of the fireflies but emphasized the shadow, and the stars seemed few and dim. It was near midnight, and the wide landscape below the mountain lay in darkness, save ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston

... mean the Capital Offenders, in their Confessions. We professing law must speak reverently of kings and potentates. I perceive these honourable lords, and the rest of this great assembly, are come to hear what hath been scattered upon the wrack of report. We carry a just mind, to condemn no man, but upon ...
— State Trials, Political and Social - Volume 1 (of 2) • Various

... My pleasure; perchance kill her, or not kill, But lead her home.—Methinks I have foregone The slaying of Helen here in Ilion.... Over the long seas I will bear her back, And there, there, cast her out to whatso wrack Of angry death they may devise, who know Their dearest dead for her in Ilion.—Ho! Ye soldiers! Up into the chambers where She croucheth! Grip the long blood-reeking hair, And drag her to mine eyes ... [Controlling himself. And when ...
— The Trojan women of Euripides • Euripides

... who will may drive a gimlet? See, I am a salaried wit; and is there aught in nature more ridiculous? A poor, dull, heart-broken man, who must needs be merry, or he will be whipped; who must rejoice, lest he starve; who must jest you, jibe you, quip you, crank you, wrack you, riddle you, from hour to hour, from day to day, from year to year, lest he dwindle, perish, starve, pine,and die! Why, when there's naught else to laugh at, I laugh at myself till I ache ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan

... seen birds flying westwards and expected to sight land before night. They therefore sailed cautiously lest they should run aground, but all their apprehension ceased when a sounding-line two hundred fathoms long, lowered through the floating sea-wrack, ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin

... Miss Ma'y Anna, you ought to buy that chile a sure-'nough doll-baby while you are in town. It f'yar breaks my heart to see how much store she sets by that po' wrack of a ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland

... scarselie merites an answere. For if the deuill their master were not bridled, as the scriptures teacheth vs, suppose there were no men nor women to be his instrumentes, he could finde waies inough without anie helpe of others to wrack al mankinde: wherevnto he employes his whole study, and goeth about like a roaring Lyon (as PETER saith) (M16) to that effect, but the limites of his power were set down before the foundations of the world were ...
— Daemonologie. • King James I

... all their nutriment from the water, which is the atmosphere of the sea in the same way as air is that of the land. Of course, some of these weeds of the ocean drift from their moorings, like that bladder wrack there with the berries." ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson

... Eliza! oh, world-famous crew! Which shall I hail more blest, your queen or you? While without other either falls to wrack, And light must eyes, or eyes their light must lack. She without you, a diamond sunk in mine, Its worth unprized, to self alone must shine; You without her, like hands bereft of head, Like Ajax rage, ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley

... again the heather will creep down, rig on rig, for all the stone dykes, deer fences, and tile drains that ever a man put money in. I never knew why it was they called it "Red Ground," for it was mostly black peaty soil, but my grandfather would be saying, "It will be growing corn. Give it wrack, and it will be growing corn ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars

... distinction between the author he has understood and the author he has not understood. Carlyle believed in himself, but he could not have believed in himself more than Ruskin did; they both believed in God, because they felt that if everything else fell into wrack and ruin, themselves were permanent witnesses to God. Where they both failed was not in belief in God or in belief in themselves; they failed in belief in other people. It is not enough for a prophet to believe in his message; ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton



Words linked to "Wrack" :   sea wrack, destruction, rack, seaweed, serrated wrack, bust up, destroy, demolition, wreck, ruin, wipeout



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