Dismal Swamp

Dismal Swamp may refer to:

  • The Great Dismal Swamp near Virginia and North Carolina, US
  • The Dismal Swamp in New Jersey, US
  • The Dismal Swamp in Tasmania, Australia

Famous quotes containing the words dismal and/or swamp:

    I have almost forgot the taste of fears.
    The time has been, my senses would have cooled
    To hear a night-shriek, and my fell of hair
    Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir
    As life were in’t. I have supped full with horrors;
    Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts,
    Cannot once start me.
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

    We read that the traveller asked the boy if the swamp before him had a hard bottom. The boy replied that it had. But presently the traveller’s horse sank in up to the girths, and he observed to the boy, “I thought you said that this bog had a hard bottom.” “So it has,” answered the latter, “but you have not got half way to it yet.” So it is with the bogs and quicksands of society; but he is an old boy that knows it.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)