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Welter   /wˈɛltər/   Listen
Welter

noun
1.
A confused multitude of things.  Synonyms: clutter, fuddle, jumble, mare's nest, muddle, smother.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Welter" Quotes from Famous Books



... rebellion means the breaking-up of the existing order, the throwing of institutions into the melting-pot, the letting loose of incalculable forces of discord and destruction, the suspension of law, the return to chaos, in the hope that out of the welter a new and better cosmos—one more fitted to promote the common good—may be evolved. Every rebel, or prospective rebel, whether of the passive or the active type, ought to ponder well the logical consequences of his revolt against authority, ought to consider the inevitable results ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw

... disappearing through the gates into the welter of sunlight without; Raleigh gathered up his feet and sprinted along the tree shaded path. He was going to understand this business. He picked up the view of the serge-clad back again, walking towards the bridge, hastened ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon

... your communicator. You'll be listened in on. But maybe the monitoring men are having their hair stand on end from the welter of communications ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster

... mound on which the Round Tower stands may or may not be pre-historic. The slopes of the hill were inhabited, like nearly all our English sites, by the Romans, and by the savages before and after the Romans; but the welter of the Saxon dark ages did not use this abrupt elevation for a stronghold. What military reasoning led William of Falaise to discern it at once and there to build ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc

... when I well might have passed and the ending have come - Points in my path when the dark might have stolen on me, artless, unrueing - Ere I had learnt that the world was a welter of futile doing: Such had been times when I well might have passed, ...
— Poems of the Past and the Present • Thomas Hardy

... confined to that of the political state. Even in the narrower confine of the latter, the fires of revolution are either violently burning, or, at least, smouldering. Two of the oldest empires in the world, which, together, have more than half of its population (China and Russia) are in a welter of anarchy; while many lesser nations are in a stage of submerged revolt. If the revolt were confined to autocratic governments, we might see in it merely a reaction against tyranny; but even in the most stable of democracies and among the most enlightened ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck

... had no desire whatever to be ejected from this snug nest into the welter of the wet and friendless world, puffed at his cigar, and looked at his host with the irresistible drollery of ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke

... ocean's wave To seek this shore; They left behind the coward slave To welter in his living grave;— With hearts unbent, and spirits brave, They sternly bore Such toils as meaner souls had quelled; But souls like these, such ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... difficult to delay its appearance in England any longer. It came out in the thirteenth month of the war, and my conscience was troubled by the awful incongruity of throwing this bit of imagined drama into the welter of reality, tragic enough in all conscience but even more cruel than tragic and more inspiring than cruel. It seemed awfully presumptuous to think there would be eyes to spare for those pages in a community which in the crash of the big ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad

... evil mock him all about, And all the forces of embattled wrong, There are so many devils to cast out— Save God be with him, how shall Man be strong? With his own heart at war, to weakness prone, And all the honeyed ways of joyous sinning, How in this welter shall he hold his own, And, single-handed, e'er have hopes of winning? How shall he fight ...
— A Jongleur Strayed - Verses on Love and Other Matters Sacred and Profane • Richard Le Gallienne

... man's words—while Thorn stared at the packet of papers with unbelieving eyes. It had never occurred to him that the Ziegler plans might be in that very room, on the table with the rest of the welter of letters, thumbed documents, and cups and saucers. And there they were—the vital projector plans—not in a safe or hidden in some fantastic place, ...
— The Radiant Shell • Paul Ernst

... of the drug. Plainly, then, the cook had been a Chinaman; and, if so, who was Jos. Amalu? Or had Jos. stolen the chest before he proceeded to ship under a false name and domicile? It was possible, as anything was possible in such a welter; but, regarded as a solution, it only led and left me deeper in the bog. For why should this chest have been deserted and neglected, when the others were rummaged or removed? and where had Jos. come by that second chest, with which (according to the clerk at the What Cheer) ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... living in a remarkable age which is making waste paper of our dearest principles. But in all the welter which the world war has made it would be difficult to find anything more extraordinary than these few paragraphs. Japan, through her official representative, boldly tears down the veil hiding her ambitions, and using the undoubted menace which Chinese revolutionary activities ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale

... nickel against an English sovereign, she'll not be sedately and patiently dining at second-table and murmuring "Yes, me Lady" in that meek and obedient manner. But it fairly took my breath, the adroit and expeditious manner in which Struthers had that welter of luggage unstrapped and unbuckled and warped into place and things stowed away, even down to her ladyship's rather ridiculous folding canvas bathtub. In little more than two shakes she had a shimmering litter of toilet things out on the dresser tops, and even a nickel alcohol-lamp set ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer

... with a pang that the hegira meant farewell, perhaps forever, to the chance of recovering her lost daughter Louise from this welter of Paris. How mysterious the ways of the Higher Power! Her beloved nephew the Chevalier, at least, was safe in the distant fortress to which the Count her husband had condemned him. Pray God Louise might be saved—, yes! and ...
— Orphans of the Storm • Henry MacMahon

... his set eyes staring vacantly into space. Once or twice he flung a furtive glance about him. His stripped and naked soul was enduring a foretaste of the Judgment Day. The whip of scorn with which the lawyer lashed him cut into his shrinking sensibilities, and left him a welter of raw and livid wales. Good God! why had he not known it would be like this? He was paying for his treachery and usury, and it was being burnt into him that as the years passed he must continue to pay in self-contempt and the distrust ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine

... John's. Let us thank God that we hold a master card in this game. We are two foxes in a flock of angry roosters, and by the Lord's grace we will take our toll of them. Cunning, my friend. A stratagem of war! We stand outside this welter and, having only the cold passion of revenge, can think coolly. God's truth, man, have we fought the Indian and the Spaniard for nothing? Wily is the word. | Are we two gentlemen, who fear God, to be worsted by a rabble of Papegots ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan

... course of history went into the welter of religious wars which gradually merge into dynastic wars and confuse the record of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth century. At the end of the last of these divisions of time ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell

... pass in. A pack of ravening wolves tussling over an unusually small baby might distantly reproduce the scene Saxham leaves behind him. The trestle-table and benches are upset, and men and benches, draughts and dominoes, welter in horrible confusion over the earthen floor, when the scandalised orderly-corporal rushes in to quell the riot, and thenceforward ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... regular Railway-Ghosts—I mean the Ghosts of ordinary Railway-literature—are very poor affairs. I feel inclined to say, with Alexander Selkirk, 'Their tameness is shocking to me'! And they never do any Midnight Murders. They couldn't 'welter in gore,' to ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll

... a fight like a welter-weight cinnamon bear; but, at last, we got him down in the bottom of the buggy and drove away. We took him up to the cave, and I hitched the horse in the cedar brake. After dark I drove the buggy to the little village, three miles ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)

... the feminist leaders, this is the first of questions; and in so far as any clear opinion on it is emerging from the welter of prejudices, that opinion is hitherto inimical to the feminist claims. Most notably is this the case in America, where the dysgenic consequences of the so-called higher education of women have ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby

... himself in a welter of internal and external intrigue, his mood swinging from singular complacency to a disquietude that sometimes approached despondency. It had come to be forced on him, in spite of his intermittent optimism, that the Government ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes

... Pacific slope," but also "the moralist of the Main." The first book which brought him great popularity, 'The Innocents Abroad', exhibited qualities of serious ethical import which, while escaping the attention of the readers of that day, emerge for the moderns from the welter of hilarious humour. How unforgettable is his righteous indignation over that "benefit" performance he witnessed ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson

... the 15th of March, 44 B.C., plunged the political situation into a worse chaos than had ever been reached during the Civil wars. For several months it was not at all plain how things were tending, or what fresh combinations were to rise out of the welter in which a vacillating and incapable senate formed the only constitutional rallying-point. In spite of all his long-cherished delusions, Cicero must have known that this way no hope lay; when at last he flung himself into the conflict, and ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail

... young English Queen of Spain is bringing into reluctant favor with women immemorially accustomed to immobility. The road was badly kept, like most things in Spain, where when a thing is done it is expected to stay done. Every afternoon it is a cloud of dust and every evening a welter of mud, for the Iberian idea of watering a street is to soak it into a slough. But nothing can spoil the Paseo, and that evening we had it mostly to ourselves, though there were two or three carriages with ladies in hats, and at one place other ladies dismounted and courageously ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells

... were always sins in his own sight; he could then only sin when he did some act against his clear conviction; the light that he walked by was obscure, but it was single. Now, when two people of any grit and spirit put their fortunes into one, there succeeds to this comparative certainty a huge welter of competing jurisdictions. It no longer matters so much how life appears to one; one must consult another: one, who may be strong, must not offend the other, who is weak. The only weak brother I am willing to consider is (to make a bull for once) ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson

... 'prophesying lies.' The priests connived at profitable falsehoods because by these their rule was confirmed. And the deluded populace, as is always the case, preferred smooth falsehoods to stern truths. So the prophet turns round indignantly, and asks what can be the end of such a welter and carnival of vice and immorality, and beseeches his contemporaries to mend their ways by bethinking themselves of what their course ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren

... wandered disconsolately through the four rooms that had been her home for nearly six years. The dust lay thick on the polished wood and glass of the sideboard and glass closet in the dining-room; ashes and the ends of cigarettes filled half a dozen little receptacles here and there; a welter of newspapers had formed a great drift in a corner of the room, and the thick velour day cover of the table had been pushed back to make way for a doubled and spotted tablecloth and the despised meal. The kitchen ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris

... would ever reach. For green hills he must have opal-hued bergs—for green fields the outspread slaty waters, rolling in the delight of their few weeks of glorious freedom, and mocking the unwieldy ice-giants that rush in wind-driven troops across their plains, or welter captive in the weary swell, and melt away beneath ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald

... he made for the line which the steamboat was following. In that wide welter of water the bobbing head would in all probability be lost to view, or any kind of shout would be drowned by the clanking noise of the paddle-wheels. The extreme danger of the exploit was not lost upon him, but the ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild

... men and women who exist no more, but who touched history with a light hand, and left their mark upon it in a host of memoirs and letters that we read to-day with a starved and home-sick longing in the midst of our sullen welter of democracy. With its silent houses and gardens, its silent streets, its silent vistas of the blue water in the sunshine, this beautiful, sad place was winning my heart and making it ache. Nowhere else in ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister

... interference by a guiding government, all organization except police organization to protect legalized fraud against fisticuffs, all attempt to introduce human purpose and design and forethought into the industrial welter, being 'contrary to the laws of political economy.' Even the proletariat sympathized, though to them Capitalist liberty meant only wage slavery without the legal safeguards of chattel slavery. People were tired of governments and kings and priests and providences, ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw

... from the welter of selfishness and brutishness and cruelty into which it is now plunged will be a costly undertaking. The church is here, as Christ's representative, to take up this work; and it must not expect to accomplish it without suffering. "It is ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden

... who weighed fourteen stone himself, and was, therefore, out of all but welter-races, and wanted a weight-carrier of tremendous power even for them, subsided under a heap of velvet and cashmere, and Cecil laughed; lying on a divan just under one of the gas branches, the light fell full on his ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]

... of sun peering over the black cloud that illumined their faces to each other, while already the sharp peaked shadow of it had come between them. For that second, while he spoke, it seemed possible that, in the middle of welter and chaos and death and enmity, these two souls could stand apart, in the passionate serene of love, and the moment lasted for just as long as she flung herself into his arms. And then, even while her face was pressed to his, and while the riotous ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson

... want to do that. These sweeping dignities were not within the compass of her will; she remembered she liked Ramage, and owed things to him, and she was interested—she was profoundly interested. He was in love with her! She tried to grasp all the welter of values in the situation simultaneously, and draw some conclusion ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells

... fierce screams of the blasts as they rush up across the layers of rock below, like hounds leaping up at their prey; and far beneath, the horrible confused battle-roar of that great leaguer of waves. He cannot see them, as he strains his eyes over the wall into the blank depth,—nothing but a confused welter and quiver of mingled air, and rain, and spray, as if the very atmosphere were writhing in the clutches of the gale: but he can hear,—what can he not hear? It would have needed a less vivid brain than Elsley's to fancy another ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley

... untainted by motives of personal profit, and their powers of vital thought not yet decayed by disuse—these and worse things will happen; love, tolerance, and the independence which is the birthright of men, will all be engulfed in a mad welter of personal, class, and national selfishness. In such a society it really would not matter very much if political education were captured by the State; and the only way, as it seems to us, of preventing its advent is by getting up a system of political education. For by political education we ...
— The School and the World • Victor Gollancz and David Somervell

... of men assembled to swear fealty to God and country. Then they marched away, through the towns and across the prairies, into thickets and swamps, to be pierced by bullets, torn by shells, to eat crusts, wear rags, shiver in the cold, burn in the heat, famish in the prison, welter in the bloody trench, above them a fiery hail, beside them their dying comrades falling into the arms of death. It is a strange, wild, chivalrous, divine story of the world's greatest enthusiasm, our ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis

... ye may readily conceive, and the least fancy to die in John Shipman's tarry jacket; and that for two excellent good reasons: first, that the death might take a man suddenly; and second, for the horror of that great salt smother and welter under my foot here"—and Lawless stamped with his foot. "Howbeit," he went on, "an I die not a sailor's death, and that this night, I shall owe a tall ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... it seemed to be floating idly to the run of the seas. Just at this moment the sun's upper limb flashed into view over the edge of the cloud-bank, darting a long gleam of golden radiance athwart the heaving welter to the schooner, and I looked again, half expecting to catch the answering flash of wet oar-blades; but there was nothing of the kind to be seen. Undoubtedly, however, there was something out there,—something that might prove to be a boat,—and ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood

... it is like this," he answered, picking up both the telegrams; "one of our groom fellows at home has a brother who knows everything about Blackmore's stable, and he has just wired to me that Dainty Dick will win the Flying Welter at Hurst Park to-day, and I was off to back it when I get a wire from my tipster, Tom Webb, that The Philosopher can't lose the same race. It is Tom's 'double nap' and I am in a hole what ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley

... been plentiful—green things Chiu-Ming might lack for his cooking, but meat never. About us was a welter of mighty summits. We were, I knew, somewhere within the blending of the Hindu-Kush with ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt

... three young light infantry officers saw a high ledge of rocks, under shelter of which a few men could form up. Wolfe, directing every movement with his cane, like Gordon in China a century later, shouted to the others to follow them; and then, amid the crash of artillery and the wild welter of the surf, though many boats were smashed and others upset, though some men were shot and others drowned, the landing was securely made. 'Who were the first ashore?' asked Wolfe, as the men were forming up under the ledge. Two Highlanders were pointed out. 'Good ...
— The Winning of Canada: A Chronicle of Wolf • William Wood

... of jagged rocks, exposed at low tide. Under the incessant flashes their black heads appeared and disappeared in a welter of frothy white. It was an ominous spectacle for the men on ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman

... him finish on that uncontrolled phrase, though it will be acknowledged that his provocation was great. Nor must we leave him in heavy captivity to the thought of oblivion in the unregarding welter of the near republic, of plunging into more strenuous activities and abandoning his ideal, in queer inverted analogy to the refuging of weak women in a convent. We know that his ideal was strong enough to reassert itself, under a keen irony of suggestion, ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan

... had entered the room with a platter of doughnuts in his hand, and stood watching, his face going pale. Quite suddenly there was a crash, and the gang leader went down in a welter of porcelain and fried pastry. Willy Cameron was badly beaten up, in the end, and the beaters were court-martialed. But something of Lily's fine faith in humanity ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... hot June day, and out of the welter of din and rumble the cool plash of falling water came to his straining ears refreshingly. At once he considered the dog and, thankful for the distraction, stepped beneath the portico of a provision store and indicated the marble basin with a ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates

... difficult to say positively whether Bulgars were or were not present in the welter of Asiatic nations which swept westwards into Europe with little intermission throughout the fifth and sixth centuries, but even if they were, they do not seem to have settled down as early as that anywhere south of the Danube; it seems certain that they did ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth

... Indeed, in this welter of newcomers here in America, whose children learn, read, write only English, the tradition of Anglo- American literature is all that holds us by a thread above chaos. If we could all be made to speak German, or Italian, or Spanish, there would be cause, ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby

... the realm of fistiana. As a shadow-boxer he excelled; as a bag-puncher also. But in an incautious hour for himself and his backer, Flash Purdy, owner of Purdy's Dixieland Bar, he had permitted himself to be entered for a match before an athletic club at Louisville against one Max Schorrer, a welter-weight appearing professionally under the nom de puge of Slugging Fogarty. It was to have been a match of twelve rounds, but early in the second round Mr. Ditto suddenly lost all conscious interest in ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb

... I hit the road and had time to think, I knew that my half-formed intention was a sort of martyrdom; I was going to renounce myself in a fine welter of tears and then go staggering off into the setting sun to die of my mental wounds. I took careful stock of myself and faced the fact that my half-baked idea was a sort of suicide-wish; walking into any Mekstrom way ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith

... of a dead author, an author seldom lauded by critics, who, possibly, have as many living friends as any modern characters can claim. A very large company of Christian people are fond of Lord Welter, Charles Ravenshoe, Flora and Gus, Lady Ascot, the boy who played fives with a brass button, and a dozen others of Henry Kingsley's men, women, and children, whom we have laughed with often, and very nearly ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang

... the four powers who were not directly concerned—Germany, France, Italy, and ourselves. If that proposal had been accepted actual controversy would have been settled with honor to everybody, and the whole of this terrible welter would have ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various

... urged towards the door. He obeyed mechanically. The strength of that chant took hold of him, stirred him, emboldened him. The hall opened to him, a vast welter of fluttering colour swaying ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells

... nothing to do with me; I was in the land of thought—farther in, higher up than the seven dimensions, the ten senses: I think I was where I am—in the heart of God.—I dreamed away dim cycles in the centre of a melting glacier, the spectral moon drawing nearer and nearer, the wind and the welter of a torrent growing in my ears. I lay and heard them: the wind and the water and the moon sang a peaceful waiting for a redemption drawing nigh. I dreamed cycles, I say, but, for aught I knew or can tell, ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald

... swing-horse from their feet. The off leader, unable to forge ahead, made a wild leap for the off swing horse, and fairly crushed him to earth with his feet, himself tripping on the harness and rolling at random in the welter, his snapping hoofs flashing in every direction. The wheel team, in the meantime, was doing what Packard later described as "a vaudeville turn of its own." The near wheeler was bucking as though there were ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn

... "Out-heroding Herod" bears witness to that. One must conceive the development of the Elizabethan age as something so rapid in its accessibility to new impressions and new manners and learning and modes of thought that for years the old and new subsisted side by side. Think of modern Japan, a welter of old faiths and crafts and ideals and inrushing Western civilization all mixed up and side by side in the strangest contrasts and you will understand what it was. The miracle plays stayed on beside Marlowe and Shakespeare till ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair

... stood there, gazing into the middle distance, an individual of dishevelled aspect sidled up, a vagrant of almost the maximum seediness, from whose midriff there protruded a trayful of a strange welter of collar-studs, shoe-laces, rubber rings, buttonhooks, and dying roosters. For some minutes he had been eyeing his lordship appraisingly from the edge of the kerb, and now, secure in the fact that there seemed to be no policeman in the immediate vicinity, ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse

... see only dimly through the mist, but it was not difficult to imagine that, in very truth, the days of the flood had returned. Nothing could be seen but the tossing, heaving welter of waters with the ice, grim and grey through the shadows, like "ships and monsters, sea-serpents and mermaids," to quote Galleon's ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole

... is hard to be humble when trodden; We cannot be meek when oppressed; Nor pure while our souls are made sodden With loathing that can't be confessed; Or true, while our bread and our shelter By a lying pretence is obtained— Deceived, in deception we welter; By a touch ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor

... breath and furtively eyed the grandfather's clock, ticking boastfully through a welter of holly—presently it would be time for the Doctor's masquerade, and later, when the clock struck twelve and the guests unmasked, that great surprise which the doctor had planned ...
— When the Yule Log Burns - A Christmas Story • Leona Dalrymple

... Among the welter of warring regions glanced at above, five sections detach themselves as centres of disturbance. The first is the Court in Kyoto and the Muromachi Bakufu, where the Hosokawa, the Miyoshi, and the Matsunaga deluged the streets with blood ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... and nostrils and beat into his eyes, stinging and blinding him. In the struggle to breathe he, all unlearned in the ways of the sea, lifted his muzzle high in the air to get out of the suffocating welter. As a result, off the horizontal, the churning of his legs no longer sustained him, and he went down and under perpendicularly. Again he emerged, strangling with more salt water in his windpipe. This time, without ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London

... answered Lancelot, with a groan; "O King!"—and when he paused, methought I spied A dying fire of madness in his eyes— "O King, my friend, if friend of thine I be, Happier are those that welter in their sin, Swine in the mud, that cannot see for slime, Slime of the ditch: but in me lived a sin So strange, of such a kind, that all of pure, Noble, and knightly in me twined and clung Round that one sin, until the wholesome flower And poisonous ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson

... adventuresses? Because good women always get up early. Bad women, on the other hand, invariably rise late. To prize a man out of bed at some absurd hour like nine-thirty is to court disaster. To take my own case, when I first wake in the morning my mind is one welter of unkindly thoughts. I think of all the men who owe me money, and hate them. I review the regiment of women who have refused to marry me, and loathe them. I meditate on my faithful dog, Ponto, and wish that I had kicked him overnight. To introduce me to the human race at that moment ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 22, 1914 • Various

... calculated to a nicety; but the thing swerved sharply and fled up the rough hillside. There followed a ghostly chase, unreal as a nightmare, lit up by the moon's deceptive brilliance; the earth, an unstable welter of light and darkness, ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver

... her into the mouth of the narrow passage between the curtain and the footlights, where the roar of the house and the welter of faces met her like a ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet

... sons of men. In true fraternity and democracy this Westerner was not only far in advance of his own day, but he is also far in advance of ours which raises statues to his memory. Yet he was used to loneliness and to the long view, and even across the welter of the World War of the twentieth century Lincoln would be tall enough to see that ship coming into the harbor under ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry

... than he expected to be—he 'phoned the Yard and the doctor. We couldn't arrive for nearly an hour, and the doctor starts on his rounds at nine o'clock sharp. What so easy, therefore, as to wander out in a welter of grief and anger, and search the wood for the murderer on his own account? One solitary minute would enable him to put the rifle in a hiding-place where it would surely ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy

... to obey, when there came a tremendous crash, and the boys found themselves floundering amid a welter of foam, nets, sand, dead fish, and broken timbers, in a deep dark hollow that looked like ...
— Harper's Young People, February 24, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... done now; there were only a few cards left. Opposite to him was a welter of party-colored counters that the croupier had not yet had time to sort out and add to the rouleaux already made; there were also a fair accumulation of notes and several little stacks of gold—in all, not less than ...
— James Pethel • Max Beerbohm

... floor between them stretched the woman's husband. The echo had outlasted his life and, because the muzzle had almost touched his breast, he sprawled in a dark welter that ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck

... own LEHNPROBST, or Official Manager for fief-casualties, in that country:—all which proceed from this Battle of Muhldorf. [Rentsch, p. 313; Pauli; &c.] Battle fought on the 28th of September, 1322:—eight years after BABBOCKBURN; while our poor Edward II. and England with him were in such a welter with their Spencers and their Gavestons: eight years after Bannockburn, and four-and-twenty before Crecy. That will date ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol, II. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Of Brandenburg And The Hohenzollerns—928-1417 • Thomas Carlyle

... graduate of the Penguin class had a method of his own for keeping that unmanageable bird traveling in a direct line, and every one was only too willing to give us the benefit of his experience. Finally, out of the welter of suggestions, one or two points became clear: it was important that one should give the machine full gas, and get the tail off the ground. Then, by skillful handling of the rudder, it might be kept traveling ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall

... day of travel arrived. We were now in a roughened and most untidy welter of mountain and jungle and glen, with violent tarns and bleak bits of moorland that had all too evidently never known the calming touch of the landscape gardener; a region, moreover, peopled by a much more lawless appearing peasantry than ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson

... shape, you see," he told her without his usual diffidence. "I don't know quite why. Everybody says I'm through, but sometimes I think something may turn up. Enough to bring me a little stake anyhow. And, anyway, it pays me a little. I'm working out with Jack English. He's a welter; he's getting ready for a go with Levitt. I've told you a lot about this business, but you can't judge much just from talk. I—I'd like to have you come ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans

... season due; For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime, Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer. Who would not sing for Lycidas? He knew Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme. He must not float upon his watery bier Unwept, and welter to the parching wind, Without the meed of some melodious tear. Begin then, sisters of the sacred well, That from beneath the seat of Jove doth spring, Begin, and somewhat loudly sweep the string. Hence with denial vain, and coy excuse; So may some gentle muse With lucky words favor my destined ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various

... an element will assume—how long it will welter to and fro as a wild democracy, a wilder anarchy—what constitution and organization it will fashion for itself, and for what depends on it in the depths of time, is a subject for prophetic conjecture, wherein brightest hope is not unmingled with fearful apprehensions and awe at the boundless ...
— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt

... unpainted little house, with its sagging blinds! It squatted there through the year like a one-eyed beggar without a friend—lost in its venerable white-beard winters, or contemplating an untidy welter of rusty ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... In fact, boxing was this young man's diversion, and the Coster on several occasions expressed great regret that writing and politics had robbed the ring of one who showed promise of being the cleverest welter-weight of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard

... theologians contributed to the welter of unreason from which this pseudo-science was developed. One question largely discussed was, whether at the Redemption it was necessary for God to take the human form. Thomas Aquinas answered that it was necessary, but William Occam and Duns Scotus answered ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... Lord St. Aldobrand is announced. Bertram's ruffian band now enter, and range themselves across the stage, giving fresh cause for Imogine's screams and madness. St. Aldobrand, having received his mortal wound behind the scenes, totters in to welter in his blood, and to die at the ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... an hour since they had gone, but she was in no hurry for his return. She wanted time for getting things straight before he came—for letting the welter subside and getting the two or three essentials clear in her mind. She hadn't ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster

... first they would head back for Farnham. (What would befall me I left to Providence!) But some two or three of the enemy must have raced ahead and cut off that retreat; for when I came to it the way to the right lay open indeed, but the whole welter was pounding down the road to the left, straight for Alton. Again I followed, and in less than two hundred yards was pressing close upon three or four of the rearmost riders. This seemed to me good opportunity ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... that the Reserve, Half of the Reserve, must be left to "mask" it; to hold it in strict blockade, with starvation daily advancing as an ally to us, and with capture by bombarding possible when we like. That is the ultimate decision;—arrived at through a welter of dubieties, counterpoisings and perilous considerations, which we now take no account of. A most busy week; Friedrich incessantly in motion, now here now there; and a great deal of heavy work got well and rapidly ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... amiss, however, to record this personal opinion: that these playwrights added little to the drama and still less to literature, and that it is hardly worth while to search out their good passages amid a welter of repulsive details. If they are to be read at all, the student will find enough of their work for comparison with the Shakespearean drama in a book of selections, such as Lamb's Specimens of English Dramatic Poetry or Thayer's The ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long

... answer to express my congratulations on President Wilson's address. I can't express adequately all that I feel. Great gratitude and great hope are in my heart. I hope now that some great and abiding good to the world will yet be wrought out of all this welter of evil. Recent events in Russia, too, stimulate this hope: they are a good in themselves, but not the power for good in this war that a great and firmly established free country like the United ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick

... again into the welter. That same evening three of my steamer companions were thrown out of a rickety taxi into a hole in the ground in the middle of New York, with the result that one of them spent a week in a hotel bed, under doctor and nurse. But I went scatheless. ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett

... Australian, a statistician and a sporting encyclopaedia. Ask him the grain output of Paraguay for 1903, or the English importation of sheetings into China for 1890, or at what weight Jimmy Britt fought Battling Nelson, or who was welter-weight champion of the United States in '68, and you'll get the correct answer with the automatic celerity of a slot-machine. And there's Andy, a stone- mason, has ideas on everything, a good chess-player; and another fellow, Harry, a baker, red hot socialist and strong ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London

... backward-sloping hand, "H. Aulif," and handed it to me, saying, "I do not add an address, for I shall be moving about. But I will write you a line very soon, and fix a day for my visit." Just then the train stopped at the foot of the Hill, and, as I was fighting my way through the welter of boys and luggage on the platform, I caught sight of a smiling face and a waved hand at the window of the carriage ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell

... that had started the delusion! "And Abraham said unto God: 'Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?'" Formerly the gods had meant might, but man's soul had come to crave for right. From the welter of human existence man had abstracted the idea of goodness and made a god of it, and then foolishly turned round and asked why it permitted the bad without which the idea of it could never have been formed. And because God was goodness, therefore ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... things—enough of nothing. She could sketch a little, play a little, sing a little, write a little. Also—and, as she remembered it, she felt for the first time a tremor of hope—she could use a typewriter reasonably well. That one accomplishment stood out in the welter of her thoughts, solid and comforting, like a rock in a quicksand. It was something definite, something marketable, something of value ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse

... Amidst this welter of proposals and counter-proposals there emerged, sometime during 1852 a scheme, propounded by Mr. Bethell, of Westminster for constructing a railway connecting the existing line at Shrewsbury with Aberystwyth. It was to run by way of the Rea Valley, through Minsterley, and to strike ...
— The Story of the Cambrian - A Biography of a Railway • C. P. Gasquoine

... hardly. If one could envisage so awful a thing as a community made up entirely of super-men, one might concede that here also the human scale might be exceeded without danger of catastrophe. With society as it is, and always will be, a welter of defectives and geniuses in small numbers and a vast majority of just plain men, with all that that implies, the breaking through into the imperial scale is simply a letting in the jungle; walls and palings and ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram

... evil gave birth to the republic of the United Netherlands, as we know it in history. The curious, amorphous, hydra-headed system of government, which was to subsist for some two centuries, was in its origin the direct result of the confused welter of conflicting forces, which was the legacy of Leicester's rule. As a preliminary to a right understanding of the political system, which was now, more by accidental force of circumstances than by design, developing into a permanent constitution, it will be necessary to trace the events ...
— History of Holland • George Edmundson

... restlessness the American woman gives. To an unaccustomed observer she seems always to be running about on the face of things with no other purpose than to put in her time. He points to the triviality of the things in which she can immerse herself—her fantastic and ever-changing raiment, the welter of lectures and other culture schemes which she supports, the eagerness with which she transports herself to the ends of the earth—as marks of a spirit not at home with itself, and certainly not convinced that it is going in any particular direction or that it ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell

... gods of wealth, of egoism, of alcohol, of fornication, we must not acknowledge; nay, we must resist unto death their malign influence and power. But alas, what are we doing to-day? Instead of looking up to the pure and lofty souls of Europe for guidance, we welter in the mud with the lowest and most degenerate. We are beginning to know and appreciate English whiskey, but not English freedom; we know the French grisettes, but not the French sages; we guzzle German beer, but of German wisdom we taste not ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani

... ovation. A lump rose in his throat. After all, this delirium of joy was sincere. He stood for the moment the idol of the populace. For him this vast concourse of human beings had waited in rain and mud and now became a deafening, seething welter of human passion. He gripped the rail tighter and closed his eyes. He heard as in a dream the voice of the mayor behind him: "Say a few words. They won't hear you—but that ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke

... which seemed to break even the record of Verdun for intensity. The French curtain of fire had checked their further advance, according to a special correspondent of the Chicago Herald, and a savage countercharge in the afternoon had gained for the defenders a corpse-strewn welter of splintered trees and shell-shattered ground that had been the southern corner of the wood. Further charges had broken against a massive barricade, the value of which as a defense paid good interest on the expenditure of German lives which its construction ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell

... from slipshod methods. In the deliberations of the Conference there was a curious mixture of efficiency and ineffectiveness; a wealth of information upon the topics under discussion and an inability to concentrate that information. Important decisions were made and forgotten in the welter of ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour

... Lashing up their foamy billows; With the laving of their forces All the pathway shakes and trembles. Brutes, in hungry anger raving, Prowl from dens, and caves, and caverns, Mingle with the ghosts and spectres, Lusting for a bloody surfeit. Reptiles, subtle and obnoxious, Crawl, and welter, and recoil them On the path in slimy matters, Reeking with a poisoned odor, Darting poisons to molest him. Arrows from the towers are flying, Shafts of flame and showers of fire, Sweeping on through clouds and vapors, Like unto a storm of hailstones Driven by a mighty ...
— A Leaf from the Old Forest • J. D. Cossar

... ensamples," and we should be foolish indeed if we did not take stock of them with an anxious eye to the future. The main and startling fact is that with every apparent desire for the re-establishment of Europe on better lines, Europe, as a matter of fact, drifted back into the old welter of conflicting nationalities, while the very instrument of peace—the Holy Alliance—was used by autocratic governments for the subjection of smaller nationalities and the destruction of popular freedom. It is accordingly very necessary that we should study the conditions under which ...
— Armageddon—And After • W. L. Courtney



Words linked to "Welter" :   disorderliness, clutter, disorder, rummage, move, roll over



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