"Billow" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is something stately and wonderful about standing rye, when one is close enough to see the individual stalks. They are so tall and slim that you cannot understand why the lightest wind does not lay them flat. Yet all day long they sway and ripple and billow in the summer wind, and unless the heavy, driving storm comes the ranks remain unbroken to the last and face the ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... upon the main, We plough the midnight billow, I gaze upon the stars, that shine And smile above thy pillow. And though far out upon the sea, My heart's still true to thee, my love, My heart's still true ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... perpetual flux can delight us, Blown like a billow by winds of the sea: Still let us bow to the shrine of St. Vitus— Vite ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley
... have I heretofore beheld in miseries, the Titan Atlas, subdued by the galling of adamantine[31] bonds, who evermore in his back is groaning beneath[32] the excessive mighty mass of the pole of heaven. And the billow of the deep roars as it falls in cadence, the depth moans, and the murky vault of Hades rumbles beneath the earth, and the fountains of the pure streaming rivers ...
— Prometheus Bound and Seven Against Thebes • Aeschylus
... Leander sitting thus began, Through numbing cold, all feeble, faint, and wan. "If not for love, yet, love, for pity sake, Me in thy bed and maiden bosom take. At least vouchsafe these arms some little room, Who, hoping to embrace thee, cheerly swum. This head was beat with many a churlish billow, And therefore let it rest upon thy pillow." Herewith affrighted, Hero shrunk away, And in her lukewarm place Leander lay, Whose lively heat, like fire from heaven fet, Would animate gross clay and higher set The drooping thoughts of base declining souls ...
— Hero and Leander • Christopher Marlowe
... the crash of bark far on the main, Bear not the cry of men, who cry in vain, The crew's dread chorus sinking into death! Oh! give not these, ye pow'rs! I ask alone, As rapt I climb these dark romantic steeps, The elemental war, the billow's moan; I ask the still, sweet tear, that listening ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... silence and re-echoed again and again through the room. The panel that held the repeater-circuit of the Holden Educator bulged outward; jets of smoke lanced out of broken metal, bulged corners, holes and skirled into little clouds that drifted upward—trailing a flowing billow of thick, black, pungent smoke that reached the low ceiling and spread outward, fanwise, obscuring the ceiling ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... father's door, He saw the form of his promised bride. The sun shone on her golden hair, And her cheek was glowing fresh and fair, With the breath of morn and the soft sea air. Like a beauteous barge was she, Still at rest on the sandy beach, Just beyond the billow's reach; But he Was the restless, ...
— The Children's Own Longfellow • Henry W. Longfellow
... speck was seen in the horizon; now it is visible above the hollow wave, now curtained from our sight by the swelling billow: we approach nearer; the speck divides, and two spots appear; they are ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... and stormy weather, That night we went to the icy Pole, And there on the rocks we stood together, And saw the ocean before us roll. No moon shone down on the hermit sea, No cheering beacon illumed the shore, No ship on the water, no light on the lea, No sound in the ear but the billow's roar! But the wave was bright, as if lit with pearls, And fearful things on its bosom played; Huge crakens circled in foamy whirls, As if the deep for their sport was made, And mighty whales through the crystal dashed, And upward sent the far glittering spray, ...
— Poems • Sam G. Goodrich
... disappeared, a tremendous noise struck upon our ears from seaward, and the storm was upon us. In the impenetrable obscurity of the night, not a trace of land could be discovered; but we continued to ply our oars, while each succeeding billow threatened ...
— Notes of a Twenty-Five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory - Volume II. (of 2) • John M'lean
... pursuing a circuitous route; and now, driven in fury before the raging tempest, in their scarcely seaworthy vessel. The awful voice of the storm howls through the rigging. The laboring masts seem straining from their base; the dismal sound of the pumps is heard; the ship leaps, as it were, madly from billow to billow; the ocean breaks, and settles with ingulfing floods over the floating deck, and beats with deadening weight, against the staggered vessel. I see them, escaped from these perils, pursuing their all but desperate undertaking, and landed at last, after a five months' ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... then we saw him running downstairs, and my heart leapt for he never once looked up. I can see him still, foreshortened by our bird's-eye view into a Turkish fez and a fringe of white hair and red neck, a billow of dressing-gown, and bare heels peeping out of bedroom slippers at every step that we could follow; but no face all the way down, because he was a bent old boy who never looked ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... towards the summit is considerably less, and it is truncated. From the exact middle of the mansion it soars from the cellar, right up through each successive floor, till, four feet square, it breaks water from the ridge-pole of the roof, like an anvil-headed whale, through the crest of a billow. Most people, though, liken it, in that part, to a ...
— I and My Chimney • Herman Melville
... hill of sand that rises yonder? One can scarcely tell, for it has as it were no shape, no outline; rather it seems like a great rosy cloud, or some huge, trembling billow, which once perhaps raised itself there, forthwith to become motionless for ever. . . . And from out this kind of mummified wave a colossal human effigy emerges, rose-coloured too, a nameless, elusive rose; emerges, and stares with fixed eyes and smiles. It is so huge it seems unreal, ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... A mighty billow flings its cloud of foam over the faces of Claude and the shrinking girl by his side, and blinds them with salt spray. But high as the tide is, the Chair is still above its reach, and although the wave may sprinkle them, it cannot swallow them up. Only they are ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... the Downs. Coming ashore later, on a giant roller, the wave burst into awful masses of towering foam, so high above and around the lugger that for an instant she was out of sight, overwhelmed, and the crowds cried, 'She's lost!' but upwards she rose again on the crest of the following billow, and with the speed of an arrow flew to the land on ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor
... time the boat was rising on the roll of the last billow, to be caught next moment by a dozen hands, and dragged up the shingle. It was evening, or rather, verging that way, and from under the magnolia- trees below the cathedral there came the sound of the band summoning the inhabitants of Funchal to congregate, ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... terror of the appointed end, For this I sigh! The billow, poised above, Fell on thee like a beast that leaps to rend: Thou couldst not know ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... flash of red flame, and a billow of thick, yellow smoke filled all the air. The cabin was afire. The hatchet-man with whom Wilbur was fighting had been backing in this direction. He was close in when the fire began to leap from the one ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... made men gash themselves and leap from precipices into the sea. To unaccustomed eyes the first sight of passion is always terrifying and is usually repellent. One must learn to adventure the big wave, the great hissing, towering billow that conceals behind its menace the wild rapture of ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... worship, the entity which is able to fuse with the harmony external to it in a larger unity. When I glance out upon a winter twilight drenching earth and sky with luminous blue, a sudden delight floods in upon me, gathering up all my senses in a surging billow of emotion, and my being pulses and vibrates in a beat of joy. Something within me goes out to meet the landscape; so far as I am at all conscious of the moment, I feel, There, that is what I am! This ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... track Comes our glorious "Stonewall" Jackson, with ten thousand at his back; And Longstreet, too, and gallant Hill, and Rhodes, and brave Huger,[1] And he whose name is worth a host, our bold, devoted Lee; And back to where the lordly James his scornful billow rolls, The recreant foe is fleeing fast—those ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... work. Details were immediately demanded, the plot of the new novel discussed and praised; there was flattery too in the diffident criticism of an incident here and there, and the sweetest foretaste of happiness in the joint rearrangement of the disputed chapter. Mallinson was lifted on a billow of confidence. He was of the type which adjusts itself to the opinions his company may have of him. Praise Mallinson and he deserved praises; ignore him and he sank like a plummet to depths of insignificance, conscious of insignificance and of nothing more except a dull rancour against the person ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... Whore; where be your Fighters? what mortal Fool durst raise thee to this daring, And I alive? by my just Sword, h'ad safer Bestride a Billow when the angry North Plows up the Sea, or made Heavens fire his food; Work me no higher; ...
— The Maids Tragedy • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... upward, just missing the jagged crest. A gout of fire forward, another, and it went into a long flat glide, following the fall of a foothill to the plain beyond. It held course and reduced speed, letting the ground billow up to it rather than descending. There was a moment of almost-flight, almost-sliding, and then a rush of dust and smoke which over-took and passed them. When it cleared, they were part of the plain, part ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn
... its cream you've driven me, And from Wyvis with its curds and cheese; While billow beats on shore you cannot drive me From ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... accursed time They bore thee o'er the billow, From love to titled age and crime, And an unholy pillow! From me, and from our misty clime, ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... wave was upon me before I had thought to execute these instructions, I straightened myself out rigidly, and lo! I shot in like a torpedo on the very top of the billow, holding the point of the board up, yelling like a Comanche Indian. So fast, so straight did I go, that it was all I could do to swerve in the shallow water and not be hurled with force ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... nearly nervous as she had accused her mother of being. But the conversation finally flagged so much that Joan began to worry about the weather once more. The wind was now frightful, the icy rain rattled against the windows, and at the open door Joan could hear billow on billow, crash on crash, shrieking blast on shrieking blast. She was unable to preserve her cheerfulness. Like all strong hearts in anxiety, she became silent. The platitudes of Denas, dropped without interest, annoyed her; she only moved her ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... his companion's reason, Meredith more than once drugged his food; but when the land began to rise beneath their feet in tentative, billow-like inequalities—the deposit of a glacial age—Durnovo refused to stop for the preparation of food. Eating dry biscuits and stringy tinned meat as they went along, the four men—three blacks and one white—followed in the footsteps of ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... incredible even when her own lips told it. She had been right in fearing the effect this knowledge would have upon him. It stung his pride, wounded his heart, and forever marred his faith in love and friendship. As the truth broke over him, cold and bitter as a billow of the sea, she saw gathering in his face the still white grief and indignation of an outraged spirit, suffering with all a woman's pain, with all a man's intensity of passion. His eye grew fiery and stern, the ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... he opened the throttle. Like knight tilting against knight, wave and engine met. There was a hissing as of the plunging of a great red-hot bar into a vat. A roaring sheet of water, thrown into the air by our momentum, washed cab and tender and car, as a billow pours over a laboring ship; and we stood on the steps, drenched to the skin, the water swirling about our ankles as we rushed forward. Then we heard the scream of triumph from the whistle, with which Schwartz cheered us as the dripping train ran on through shallower ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... him! he must be drowned!' I exclaimed, as my eyes fell upon a poor wretch who appeared to be striving to reach the shore; he was upon his legs, but was evidently half smothered with the brine; high above his head curled a horrible billow, as if to engulf him for ever. 'He must be drowned! he must be drowned!' I almost shrieked, and dropped the book. I soon snatched it up again, and now my eye lighted on a third picture: again a shore, but what a sweet and lovely one, ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... his force and power was gone: but how soeuer it chaunced, a gale of winde blew out of the skies, and strake the coaffer against the borde whereuppon Landolpho was, who by that meanes driuen backe, was forced to giue ouer the plancke, and with a billow was beaten vnder the water, and afterwardes, remounting aloft againe, hee swam more through feare then force. And seing the borde caried a farre of from him, fearinge lest he should not be able to fasten the same againe, he drewe toward the coafer which was nere ynough vnto him, ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... the sky, The eighth was a tempest most drear, I saw the huge billow rise high! I saw ...
— Poems • Matilda Betham
... the South, it shows Its frosted brow, and waves its shaggy woods, And sullenly above the billow broods. Here he that shook the frighted world arose. 'Twas here he gained the strength the wing to plume, To swoop upon the Arno's classic plains, And drink the noblest blood of Europe's veins— His eye but glanced and nations felt their doom! Alas! ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... turning to look the daring assailant in the face, the rogue had pitched himself back into his cave. No sooner that, than a very bulldog of a billow would attack him in the face. The serenity with which the impertinent assault was borne was complete. It was but a puff of silvery dust, powdering his mane with fresher brightness. Nothing would be left of bull but a little froth of all the foam displayed in the fierce onset. He too ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... every billow, The sun's shield shines 'neath many a golden spear, To lean with you, against this leafy pillow, To murmur words of love in this loved ear— To feel you bending like a bending willow, This is to be a ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... rang hauntingly in Eric's ears as his boat hit the first incoming billow. The former rescue in the moonlight had held a quick thrill, but it had been nothing like this tense eager race in the darkness. Nearly a quarter of an hour had passed in the station-house before the rescued man had ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Life-Savers • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... men bowling o'er the billow, Or him, less wise, Who chose rough bramble-bushes for a ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... men, and nations, have passed by, Like leaves upon an autumn's dreary sky; Like chaff upon the ocean billow proud, Like drops of rain on summer's fleecy cloud; Like flowers of a ...
— Victor Roy, A Masonic Poem • Harriet Annie Wilkins
... night, Sadly to greet her,— Moon in her silver light, Stars in their glitter. Then sank the moon away Under the billow, Still wept the maid alone— There by ...
— The Fitz-Boodle Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... unseen by the world, he sees Someone standing with His hand upon the tiller, Someone Whom he believes to have supreme power in the last resort over the waves, and Who he knows, at exactly the right moment when it is best for him, will say the word before which every billow and every storm sinks ...
— The After-glow of a Great Reign - Four Addresses Delivered in St. Paul's Cathedral • A. F. Winnington Ingram
... with a start, crying out that his father was dead. The child was quieted, and again he woke up exclaiming that his father was drowned. A month later the news came that his father had, in fact, been swept off the deck of his smack by a billow. The widow then remembered how her son had wakened up and spoken of his father's death. Everyone said it was a miracle, and the affair caused a great sensation. The dates were compared, and it was found that the accident and the ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... boat drew nearer, as I said; they were almost within hail; Dan saw her hair streaming on the wind; he waited only for the long wave. On it came, that long wave,—oh! I can see it now!—plunging and rearing and swelling, a monstrous billow, sweeping and swooning and rocking in. Its hollows gaped with slippery darkness, it towered and sent the scuds before its trembling crest, breaking with a mighty rainbow as the sun burst forth, it fell ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... entered, and as her eye wandered about the vacant room, it fell upon a white and tempestuous ocean of counterpane, an ocean breaking into strange movements of wave and crest and billow. ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... grieve not for the dead alone, Whose song has told their heart's sad story,— Weep for the voiceless, who have known The cross without the crown of glory! Not where Leucadian breezes sweep O'er Sappho's memory-haunted billow, But where the glistening night-dews weep On nameless ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... to them and was never meant to be. Rather should their footsteps lead them where the bobolink sings as he circles over a green meadow, and the blue water lilies stoop to kiss the brook that ripples through it; or where the fields of grain bend and billow in the summer breeze; or the old mill-wheel splashes, while the white flowers in the pond above smile in the sunlight. If the patient reader will but follow their lives a little further, only peace and happiness and all the gentle voices of ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... billow swells! The God! the God! his boast: A boast how vain! what wrecks abound! Dead bards stench every ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... only safety was in being bound with ropes to the masts—I saw this man, who had fixed himself to one with a cord that was not very strong, and who held his wife clasped in his arms, that the waters might not carry her away. At last there came one gigantic billow, whose power it seemed impossible to withstand; then I saw this man withdraw the support of his arm from the poor creature, who seemed anxious only to die with him, and use both his hands to clasp the pole which sustained ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... billow, Our opening timbers creak, Each fears a watery pillow. ... To cling to slippery shrouds Each breathless seaman crowds, As she lay Till the day In the Bay of ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... was the gala opera. Johan dined at Count Billow's (the Reichskanzler) at five o'clock, while I dressed for the theater. We were obliged to be there at eight o'clock sharp. "Sharp" is the word here. There is no loitering where the Emperor is concerned. Everything is on time, and his Majesty is sometimes before the hour mentioned, ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone
... wind, who wanderest Like the world's rejected guest, Hast thou still some secret nest On the tree or billow?" ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... billow rising, curving, high as the gaff of the main, it seemed to him, as he grasped at the coil of the main halyards. Down came the tons of water, booming on the deck that bent under the blow, spilling in a great cataract ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... for me," Sung above a coffin lid; Underneath, all restfully, All life's joys and sorrows hid. Nevermore, O storm-tossed soul! Nevermore from wind or tide, Nevermore from billow's roll, Wilt thou need thyself to hide. Could the sightless, sunken eyes, Closed beneath the soft gray hair, Could the mute and stiffened lips Move again in pleading prayer, Still, aye still, the words would be,— "Let me hide ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... officers and gentlemen volunteers embarked with him. A boat, two wherries, and a barge carried forty more. They were victualled for a month. The ships anchored near los Gallos in the Gulf of Paria. Twenty miles of sea were crossed 'in a great billow' to Guanipa Bay, where dwelt savages who shot poisoned arrows. Then the expedition was entangled in a labyrinth of rivers. These were the eight branches of the Orinoko. 'All the earth,' wrote Ralegh, 'doth not yield the like ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... almost mythical Etruscan city of Veii, the Troy of Italy. The view in this direction is bounded by the advanced guard of the Sabine range, the blue peak of Soracte looking, as Lord Byron graphically says, like the crest of a billow about to break. In front, at your feet, is the city, broken up into the most picturesque masses by the irregularity of the ground; here and there a brighter light glistening on some stately campanile or cupola, and flashing back from the graceful columns ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... They also, like the birds, seemed pitifully tiny. But, unlike the birds, they did not seem purposeless. It was evident they were moving, though one could not see rowers, oars, or splashes, for they progressed in short jumps and above the dulled rattle of a billow breaking on the pebbles, the faint click-thud of oars between thole-pins was plainly audible. I had an odd fancy that the six men were rowing through immensity, into eternity, to meet God; and that they ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... "Oath of Supremacy," which was the objectionable one to the Catholics, was dispensed with. Now, if we stood in the same circumstances as the Catholics did in 1828, the example would be in point. When the public mind is thoroughly revolutionized, and ready for the change, when the billow has reached its height and begins to crest into foam, then such a measure may bring matters to a crisis. But let us first go through, in patience, as O'Connell did, our twenty years of agitation. Waiving all other objections, this plan ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... words in such a scene! Yon rosy mists on high careering,— The Moorish cavaliers who fleet With hawk and hound and distant cheering,— The dipping sail puffed to the gale, The prow that spurns the billow's fawning,— How can they fade to dimmer shade, And how this day desert ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... being therby garded from the danger of the lesser driuing yce. [Sidenote: Hard shifts.] But when they must needes forgoe this new found fort by meanes of other yce, which at length would vndermine and compasse them round about, and when that by heauing of the billow they were therewith like to be brused in peeces, they vsed to make fast the shippe vnto the most firme and broad peece of yce they could find, and binding her nose fast thereunto, would fill all their sayles whereon the winde hauing great power, would force forward the ship, ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, Vol. XII., America, Part I. • Richard Hakluyt
... the foaming shore, The chidden billow seems to pelt the clouds.... I never did like molestation view On the ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... kopje. The guns limber up and jump the railway line—a pretty stiff little obstacle—the narrow gauge metals being on top of a narrow embankment. Then across a level field of veldt, and they commence to ascend a slight depression, which is just behind a shouldering billow of veldt. It is hard work for the artillery horses over this ground, but it is fine the way they tug and strain at their work. The officers urge the men to hurry forward. Already a gun is heard from the Boers. They have opened fire. Two wheelers of an artillery waggon drop down, apparently ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... down. Below her, beyond the packed roofs and chimneys, the smoke rose in a thick, curling rampart. It loomed in mounded masses, swelled into lowering spheres, dissolved into long, soaring puffs, looked solid and yet was perpetually taking new forms. In places it suddenly heaved upward, a gigantic billow shot with red, at others lay a dense, churning wall, here and there broken by ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... right beneath her bows, She drifted a dreary wreck, And a whooping billow swept the crew ...
— The Children's Own Longfellow • Henry W. Longfellow
... not for loss of dirt— Once stainless, just because of what thou wert. Thus on thy banks I linger and reflect That, surely as all waterways connect, Forever flowing onward to the sea, Shall the great billow thy ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... might well crush out all life and hope and send him into helpless bankruptcy, with the poor consolation that, though legally responsible, he was not morally bound to pay other people's debts. But Scott's own sanguine carelessness had been partly to blame for the Ballantyne failure; and he faced the billow as it suddenly appeared, bowed to it in grief but not in shame, and, while not pretending to any stoicism, instantly resolved to devote the remainder of his life to the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... disembark upon it. After a long and perilous drifting of the canoe hither and thither, its voyagers were at length able to lay their heads down at night upon solid land, and to sleep unrocked by the tempestuous billow. ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... the boiling zig-zag current, now avoiding great, jagged rocks by a hair's-breadth, now bounding like a deer over a smooth incline, now plunging into a seething white billow; and, when at last they swept round into the quiet bay at the foot of the cataract, Dan leaped up, and waving his paddle on high uttered a wild war-whoop learned long ago in the swamps of the Oro. There was an answering cheer from the group of men waiting at the landing. "Well done, ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... he was following those who were descending to the village. They soon came in sight of the inn, which was, however, scarcely visible, so small did it look, a black speck at the foot of that enormous billow of snow, and when they opened the door Sam, the great curly dog, began to ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... the North Channel. To her aid hurrying up from Old Point came the Roanoke and the Saint Lawrence. Our own batteries at Sewell's Point opened upon these two ships as they passed, and they answered with broadsides. We fed our engines, and under a billow of black smoke ran down to the Minnesota. Like the Congress, she lay upon a sand bar, beyond fear of ramming. We could only manoeuvre for deep water, near enough to her to be deadly. It was now late afternoon. I could ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... called Solyma; at once the God's wrath is roused and he talks to himself, "shaking his head." The clouds, the winds, the ocean obeyed his behest, and fell upon the voyager in a furious tempest. A huge billow whirled the raft around and threw Ulysses off into the deep; with difficulty be regained his place, and ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... to associate with, in those days, was especially annoying to a good Christian woman, and yet it had its good points. It offered a little religious freedom, which could not be had among those who wanted it so much that they braved the billow and the wild beast, the savage, the drouth, the flood, and the potato-bug, to obtain it before anybody else got a chance at it. Freedom ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... situation, "The Pot," which he looked upon as one of the best things he had written, was lost to him. In despair, casting about frantically among the magazines, he had sent it to The Billow, a society weekly in San Francisco. His chief reason for submitting it to that publication was that, having only to travel across the bay from Oakland, a quick decision could be reached. Two weeks later he was overjoyed to see, in the latest number on the news-stand, ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... Bride she rejected, you know, with expressions I will not repeat. Well—she did no more than all publishers did. Though my prospects were marred, I can pity and pardon them. Blindness, mere blindness! And yet it was hard. For a poet, Bill, is a blossom—a bird—a billow—a breeze— A kind of creature that moves among men as a wind among trees. And a bard who is also the pet of patricians and dowagers doubly can Express his contempt for canaille in his fables where beasts are republican. Yet with all my disdainful forgiveness ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... struggle in the darkness with the wild waves and the blast, On a rock, where every billow broke above him as it passed, Alone, of all his household, the man of ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... longer snowing; it was "snowballing;" it was an avalanche out of the slopes of the sky. The exhausted horses floundered in it; the clogging wheels dragged in it; the vehicle at last plunged into a billow of ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte
... sceptre, and inforcement of the laws, 245 That he may rule us as a monarch ought.[8] With such authority the troubled host He sway'd; they, quitting camp and fleet again Rush'd back to council; deafening was the sound As when a billow of the boisterous deep 250 Some broad beach dashes, and the Ocean roars. The host all seated, and the benches fill'd, Thersites only of loquacious tongue Ungovern'd, clamor'd mutinous; a wretch Of utterance prompt, but in coarse phrase ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... to open the car door, and other hands caught and cared for the billow of satin and costly lace with which she was surrounded, as if it, and not she, were the ...
— Exit Betty • Grace Livingston Hill
... fire until the enemy was almost upon us. At the right instant our rifles poured out a perfect billow of death. Painted bodies reeled and fell; horses sank down, or rushed mad with pain, upon their fallen riders; shrieks of agony mingled with the unearthly yells; while above all this, the steady roar of our guns—not a wasted bullet in all the line—carried death waves out ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... closed in slumber, excepting in the case of little Inez Hawthorne, who felt the situation only to the extent that it compelled her to stay close in the cabin, while the vessel pitched and tossed from the crest of one tremendous billow, down, seemingly, into the fathomless depths between, and then laboriously climbed the mountain in front, with the spray and mist whirling about the deck and rigging like millions of fine shot. But the gallant Coral rode ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... would be upon him before he could reach the deck, and that there was only one way of escape. Thrusting his slim figure between the beams of the open-work, where no full-grown man could have passed, he held on with all his strength. Crash came the great billow against the side, making the whole ship quiver from stem to stern; but Austin remained unhurt. The next moment ...
— Harper's Young People, March 30, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... dash in; and diving under the swells, make straight for the outer sea, pausing not till the comparatively smooth expanse beyond has been gained. Here, throwing themselves upon their boards, tranquilly they wait for a billow that suits. Snatching them up, it hurries them landward, volume and speed both increasing, till it races along a watery wall, like the smooth, awful verge of Niagara. Hanging over this scroll, looking down from it as from a precipice, the bathers halloo; ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... moment? I believe I did not hear the dull roar of the explosion. But the rocks suddenly assumed a new arrangement: they rent asunder like a curtain. I saw a bottomless pit open on the shore. The sea, lashed into sudden fury, rose up in an enormous billow, on the ridge of which the unhappy raft was uplifted bodily in the air with all its ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... and myself had cast To stop him as he outward pass'd; But, lighter than the whirlwind's blast, He vanish'd from our eyes, Like sunbeam on the billow cast That glances but, ...
— The Prose Marmion - A Tale of the Scottish Border • Sara D. Jenkins
... incomprehensible was, that the shipwrecked mariner should be punished in an after-state for not having guided his vessel better; when the rudder which had been given him to shape his course by was so weak that any extraordinary billow could not fail to ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... dark-blue dome of the sky fills with a lighter azure; the star swoons, and the sun peers over the crest. It ascends. Its rays plunge into the pool of darkness still upon the meadow; they pierce it, at first separately as with rapier thrusts, and then finally billow down into it in a cascade of molten gold. The shadows flee; the sunlight strikes the cabin; and Charles-Norton Sims appears at ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... Billow and breeze, islands and seas, Mountains of rain and sun, All that was good, all that was fair, All that was ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 14 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... leaves, Hear a throbbing heart that grieves, Not for joys this world can give, But the life that spirits live: Spirit of the foaming billow, Visit thou my nightly pillow, Shedding o'er it silver dreams, Of the mountain brooks and streams, Sunny glades, and golden hours, Such as suit thy buoyant powers: Spirit of the starry night, Pencil out thy fleecy light, That my footprints still my lead To the ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... its peace, endangering its safety, but that which was produced by busy, restless politicians. It has been maintained that the surface of the public mind is perfectly smooth and undisturbed by a single billow. I most heartily wish I could concur in this picture of general tranquillity that has been drawn upon both sides of the Senate. I am no alarmist; nor, I thank God, at the advanced age at which His providence has been pleased to allow me to reach, am I very easily alarmed by any human event; but I ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... foundations of the future. And because you have delayed the work of centuries for a few days, you think you have shattered the hourglass of Eternity. There is much pride in this grief, Lelia! But God will make this billow of stormy centuries, that for him are but a drop in the ocean, float by. The devouring hydra will perish for lack of food; and from its world-covering corpse a new race will issue, stronger and more ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... [Hector] with soothing words: "Brother-in-law of me, shameless authoress of mischief-devising, fearful wretch, would that, on the day when first my mother brought me forth, a destructive tempest of wind had seized and borne me to a mountain, or into the waves of the much-resounding ocean, where the billow would have swept me away before these doings had occurred. But since the gods have thus decreed these evils, I ought at least to have been the wife of a braver man, who understood both the indignation ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... not the surging billow's roar, 'Tis not that fatal, deadly shore; Tho' death in ev'ry shape appear, The wretched have no more to fear: But round my heart the ties are bound, That heart transpierc'd with many a wound: These bleed afresh, those ties I tear, To leave ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... spread ruffling in the wind, And sanguine streamers seem'd the flood to fire: The weaver, charm'd with what his loom design'd, Goes on to sea, and knows not to retire. With roomy decks, her guns of mighty strength, Whose low-laid mouths each mounting billow laves, Deep in her draught, and warlike in her length, She seems a ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... port e'er fled From the dark billow, when some tempest's nigh, As from tumultuous gloomy thoughts I fly— Thoughts by the force of goading passion bred: Nor wrathful glance of heaven so surely sped Destruction to man's sight, as does that eye Within whose bright black ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... the mothers think, Who yet may stand beholding sink, Under the hastily-roused billow, Sons, upthriven ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... at the saloon door, wistfully did Miss Allison regard him, but only as the means to an end. She wanted to get there, and did not see a way without a helping hand, and just here old Neptune seemed to tender it. A huge, foam-crested billow came sweeping straight from the invisible shores of Albion, burst in magnificent deluge upon the port bow, lifted high in air one instant the heaving black mass of the stem, then let it down with stomach-stirring swish deep into the hollow beyond,—deep, ...
— A Tame Surrender, A Story of The Chicago Strike • Charles King
... like a stiffened billow of the sea, green with purple glints. The clear western sky was ruddy gold, the sun's great ball approaching the horizon. But when it dipped the short June night would know little dark in this northern land. The air struck most fresh and pure. Glenfernie came presently upon the old farmer, found ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... still so distant, and in the grey dawn so misty-looking and indistinct, that it was difficult to decide the question. The captain himself was not certain. "However, we shall soon be able to settle the matter," he observed, as the Barbara, now on the summit of a mountain billow, was about to glide down the steep incline. Down, down, we went—it seemed that we should never be able to climb the opposite height. We were all looking out for the strangers, expecting to settle the disputed point. "Where are they?" ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... field of battle round which our company has uncertainly wandered since the morning. I saw a limitless gray plain, across whose width the wind seemed to be driving faint and thin waves of dust, pierced in places by a more pointed billow of smoke. ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... But suddenly, wonderful enough, there came a breeze, a brisk spurt out of the north. The bunting caught it, twisted upon itself, tumbled, writhed, then suddenly shook itself free, and in a single long billow rolled out into the Stars and ...
— The Surrender of Santiago - An Account of the Historic Surrender of Santiago to General - Shafter, July 17, 1898 • Frank Norris
... noise and traffic of the city, Freshwater Bay affords a delightful retreat. During the bright days of summer the sea breaks in gentle murmur on the sand and shingle of the beach, but in winter when lashed by S.W. Gales "it tumbles a billow on chalk and sand." The roar of the ocean can be heard for miles inland. The esplanade shown in the picture has been destroyed by the breakers. Temporary repairs have been effected, but a fierce controversy is still raging as to the ultimate solution of the ...
— Pictures in Colour of the Isle of Wight • Various
... were rows and rows of breakers, leaping, breaking, and gathering again, until they were lost in a tumble of white foam that rushed and receded on the sands. These did not look to be very large until she noticed the twin piers reaching out from the river's mouth. Each billow, as it came in, rose sullenly above them, broke tempestuously to overwhelm the entire structure of their ends, and ripped inshore along their lengths, the crest submerging as it ran every foot of the massive structures. ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... serving the material with no greater interest in it than has the cheesemonger in the cheese he weighs and deals. Meanwhile, the glimpse we may take of him shows Bill Wyvern urging along his pen until clean paper became magic manuscripts; living upon a billow of hope when the envelopes were sped, submerged beneath oceans of gloom when they were returned; trembling into Fleet Street deliciously to inhale the thick smell of printer's ink that came roaring up from a hundred basements; with goggle eyes venerating the men who with assured steps passed in ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... straight for Ascalon it dropped out of sight, and one unused to the trend of things might wonder if it had gone off on another line. Presently it would appear again, laboring up out of a dip, rise the intervening billow of land, small as a toy that one could hold in the hand, and sink out of sight again. This way it approached Ascalon, now promising, now denying, drawing into ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... In loneliness By crowded mart or busy street, I fold my hands and feel how less Am I to any one I meet, Than to Thee one lost billow's roll: Lord! no man careth for ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... running, he found that he had left the ravine quite out of sight. The country about him was rolling, and as the wind waved the tall grass before his eyes, it was as if he were looking upon a great gray-green sea, and the ravine doubtless lay between the billow-like swells of land that spread out in ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume XIII, No. 51: November 12, 1892 • Various
... when the block was not more than half a cable's length from the "Jeune-Hardie," a dull sound was heard, and a veritable waterspout fell upon the bow of the vessel, which then rose on the back of an enormous billow. ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... large company of naked natives, of both sexes and all ages, amusing themselves with the national pastime of surf-bathing. Each heathen would paddle three or four hundred yards out to sea, (taking a short board with him), then face the shore and wait for a particularly prodigious billow to come along; at the right moment he would fling his board upon its foamy crest and himself upon the board, and here he would come whizzing by like a bombshell! It did not seem that a lightning express train could shoot along at a more hair-lifting speed. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... sea, when tempests gathering dark Pour the fierce billow on the shatter'd bark, The surge may break, the warring winds may rave, 'Tis God controls the vengeance of the wave; And those who trust in his Almighty arm No storm shall vex, nor hurricane alarm; He is their stay when earthly hope is lost, The light ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... and swift— A love in desolation masked—a Power Girt round with weakness; it can scarce uplift The weight of the superincumbent hour; Is it a dying lamp, a falling shower, A breaking billow;—even whilst we speak Is it not broken? On the withering flower The killing sun smiles brightly: on a cheek The life can burn in blood, even while the ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... wind, which drove him out to sea, till he was lost to the hermit's view; and he ceased not to fare on over the abysses of the ocean, one billow tossing him up on the crest of the wave and another bearing him down into the trough of the sea, and he beholding the while the terrors and wonders of the deep, for the space of three days, at the end of which time Fate cast him upon the Mount ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous
... nightingale was singing, the stars were shining, and the trees were softly whispering, lulled both by slumber and by the softness of the summer, and by the warmth. Lavretzky surrendered himself wholly to the billow which was bearing him onward,—and rejoiced; but no word can express that which took place in the young girl's pure soul: it was a secret to herself; so let it remain for all others. No one knows, no one has seen, and no one ever will see, how ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... well, too: with grace, with distinction, her head held high, even thrown back a little, superciliously. She had an immense quantity of very lovely hair. Red hair? Yellow hair? Red hair with yellow lights burning in it? Yellow hair with red fires shimmering through it? In a single loose, full billow it swept away from her forehead, and then flowed into a half-a-thousand rippling, crinkling, capricious undulations. And her skin had the sensitive colouring, the fineness of texture, that are apt to accompany red hair when it's yellow, yellow hair when it's red. Her face, with its pensive, ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... Grady, if you can find a competent assassin, I wouldn't make it a point with him to oblige Mr. Markley. I don't care particularly to have the poet buried in the weltering sea. If he can't find a roaring billow, I'll be perfectly satisfied to have him chucked into a creek. And I dare say that it'll make no material difference whether the dolphins gobble him or the catfish and eels nibble him up. It's all the same in the long run. Mention this to your murderer when ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... and low Ever, o'er the curved shells, Wanders with a fitful flow As the billow sinks or swells. Now, to faintest whispers hushing, Now, in louder cadence gushing, Wakens from their pleasant sleep All the tuneful Nereid-throng, Till their notes of wreathed song Float in magic streams along, Chanting joyaunce ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 581, Saturday, December 15, 1832 • Various
... down, to the sea gate at the end of a warm, still, foggy day. There in the deepening twilight we drifted without a sign of a world around us—till in from the ocean there came a deep billow, then another and another, and as our small craft darted off to one side a gigantic gray shadow loomed through the fog with four black towers of smoke overhead, lights gleaming from a ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... The survivors in addition to Cessair were, her father Bith, two other men, Fintan and Ladru, and fifty women. All of these perished on the hills except Fintan, who slept on the crest of a great billow, and lived to see Partholon, ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... her early pillow, And the heavens grew rosy-rich, and rare; Laughed the dewy plain and glassy billow, For the Golden God himself was there; And the vapour-screen Rose the hills between, Steaming up, like ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun
... line creeps up the western horizon. Tom, gesticulating, swears that he sees 'a billow break.' True: there they come; the great white horses, that 'champ and chafe, and toss in the spray.' That long-becalmed trawler to seaward fills, and heels over, and begins to tug and leap impatiently at the weight of her heavy trawl. Five minutes more, and the breeze will ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... Less upon the trusted oak, Mans the helm himself and jeereth At the wild wind's sportive stroke. Tighter now the sail he fastens, Fleeter o'er the water skims, Straight to westward fearless hastens, Goes where'er the billow swims. ...
— Fridthjof's Saga • Esaias Tegner
... and (seeing) that himself and the ship must needs be possessed of the enemy who were now all cast in a ring round about him, the Revenge not able to move one way or another, but as she was moved by the waves and billow of the sea, commanded the Master Gunner, whom he knew to be a most resolute man, to split and sink the ship, that thereby nothing might remain of glory or victory to the Spaniards: seeing in so many hours' fight, and with so great a navy, they were not able to ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... chess-board,—then the houses and towns, tiny as children's toys—then the azure gleam of the sea and the boats dancing like bits of cork upon it,—then finally the plainer, broader view, wherein the earth with its woods and hills and rocky promontories appeared to heave up like a billow crowned with varying colours,—and so steadily, easily down to the pattern of grass and flowers from the centre of which the Palazzo d'Oro rose like a little white house for ...
— The Secret Power • Marie Corelli
... swift flocks, and that I were lifted up above the ocean wave that dashes against the Adriatic shore, and the water of Eridanus, where for grief of Phaethon the thrice wretched virgins let fall into their father's billow the amber-beaming brightness of their tears: and that I could make my way to the shore where the apples grow of the harmonious daughters of Hesperus, where the ruler of the ocean no longer permits the passage of the purple sea to mariners, dwelling in that ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... and a number of resources for doing it required to be discussed. Ramsey mentioned the unidentified man with the cornet but found no seconder. His "Life on the Ocean Wave" was thought hardly convincing and his "Bounding Billow, Cease thy Motion" seemed to clash with the sentiment for an ocean life and to suggest uncomfortable symptoms. Undaunted, she tried again. Through Basile she had early discovered three striplings of the circus ring, the "Brothers Ambrosia." Their true name, her cross-examination ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... night, yet a wilder night Hung around o'er the mother's pillow; In her bosom there waged a fiercer fight Than the fight on the wrathful billow. ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... love! that are Hung high, like the cliff-swallow's perilous nest, Most like to fall when fullest, and that jar With every heavier billow! O unrest Than balmiest deeps of quiet sweeter far! How did ye triumph now in Margaret's breast, 270 Making it readier to shrink and start Than quivering gold of the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... lover rest, Whom the fates sever From his true maiden's breast, Parted for ever? Where, through groves deep and high, Sounds the far billow; Where early violets die Under the willow. Eleu loro, &c. Soft shall ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... scarcely had he reached the door And seized his staff of oak, When like a billow with a roar The chase upon ...
— The Book of Saints and Friendly Beasts • Abbie Farwell Brown |
