"Billow" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... well, cut cable silently, And bending to the eager oars sweep out along the sea. He heard it, and his feet he set to follow on the sound; But when his right hand failed to reach, and therewithal he found 670 He might not speed as fast as fares the Ionian billow lithe, Then clamour measureless he raised, and ocean quaked therewith Through every wave, and inwardly the land was terrified Of Italy, and AEtna boomed from many-hollowed side. But all the race of Cyclops stirred ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... 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 ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... 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 ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... in the navy, the Olympia has a complete printing outfit on board, and issues, at intervals, a very creditable sheet called the "Bounding Billow." This is its ...
— Young Peoples' History of the War with Spain • Prescott Holmes
... cloud of pure white mist rising in an ever-shifting veil from the gorge into which plunged and roared the mighty volume of water. Then came Goat Island, with Horseshoe Falls beyond, shooting forth great boiling fountains of white spray and sending heavenward billow after billow of mist. Beneath them rushed the broad river, writhing and twisting, as if still suffering agonies after its frightful plunge over those dizzy heights to be rent and torn to tatters ...
— Frank Merriwell's Pursuit - How to Win • Burt L. Standish
... happy flower, Till love approached one fatal hour, And made my tender branches feel The wounds of his avenging steel. Then lost I fell, like some poor willow That falls across the wintry billow! ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... was 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?" burst from the ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston
... it hiss'd and it whirl'd, And it bubbled like water when mingled with flame, And columns of foam to the heaven were hurl'd, And billow on billow tumultuously came; It seem'd that the womb of the ocean would bear Sea over ...
— The Song of Deirdra, King Byrge and his Brothers - and Other Ballads • Anonymous
... weather was cloudy, the sea grey, but calm. Scarcely a billow. Captain Nemo, whom I hoped to meet, would he be there? I saw no one but the steersman imprisoned in his glass cage. Seated upon the projection formed by the hull of the pinnace, I inhaled the ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... cattle closer to their stalls. No sooner are the winds at point to rise, Than either Ocean's firths begin to toss And swell, and a dry crackling sound is heard Upon the heights, or one loud ferment booms The beach afar, and through the forest goes A murmur multitudinous. By this Scarce can the billow spare the curved keels, When swift the sea-gulls from the middle main Come winging, and their shrieks are shoreward borne, When ocean-loving cormorants on dry land Besport them, and the hern, her marshy haunts Forsaking, mounts above the soaring cloud. ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... phosphoric on the billow, Or hermit ray of evening sky, Like ripplings round a weeping ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... Once so faithful and so true, On the deck of fame that died, With the gallant good Riou: Soft sigh the winds of heaven o'er their grave; While the billow mournful rolls, And the mermaid's song condoles, Singing glory to the ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... Ere Spring returns, far Canadian homesteads will house their contingents of "Nobody's Boys." Let them take with them kind thoughts of Old England, and memories sweet of its rare rural joys. Let them "camp out" once again, by the ocean, and plunge in the billow, and rove on the sands; Know the true British brine-whiff by experience. Help, British Public, their friends' kindly hands. Good is the work, and the fruit of it excellent; giving poor wastrels a fair start in life, Taste of true pleasure, and wholesome enjoyment, aid ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, July 5, 1890 • Various
... turn, then suddenly the canoe beneath them was lifted like a straw and tossed high into the air. A mighty mass of water boiled up beneath it and around it. Then the foam rushed in, and vaguely Geoffrey knew that they were wrapped in the curve of a billow. ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... as we go. Swing his coffin to and fro; As of old the lusty billow Swayed him on his heaving pillow: So that he may fancy still, Climbing up the watery hill, Plunging in the watery vale, With her wide-distended sail, His good ship securely stands Onward ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... Sometimes a huge, green, glittering wave would arise and roll towards the shell, and the fishermen would close their eyes; but in response to the rower's quick wrist, the little skiff would turn and climb over the roaring crest of the terrible billow. Sometimes the boat was nowhere to be seen, and one of the ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... dog's nose, and into this ring Newton had fitted a cork, through which he had thrust a large needle which protruded, an inch-long bayonet, in front of Ponto's nose. As the grader swept back, horses straining, harness creaking and a billow of dark earth rolling before the knife, Ponto, fully equipped with this stinger, raced madly alongside, a friend to every man, but not unlike some people, one whose friendship was of all things ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... currents flow, Rising or falling, swift or slow, The tender petals like white wings go, Floating, eddying, wavering low, Wheeling and sinking in showers of snow; And under their light and flickering fall, The mound, and the flowering moss, and all, Grow blanched and white as a billow's crest. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... there was cause, so fair she was, and he now come far into his eighteenth year. She was that day clad all in black, without any adornment, and her hair was knit up as a crown about her beauteous head, which sat upon her shoulders as the swan upon the billow: her hair had darkened since the days of her childhood, and was now brown mingled with gold, as though the sun were within it; somewhat low it came down upon her forehead, which was broad and white; her eyes were blue-grey and lustrous, ...
— The Sundering Flood • William Morris
... there is always some biggest wave to be met somewhere on the voyage,—a monster billow that engulfs disabled vessels, and sometimes carries away parts of the rigging of the stanchest. This big wave struck us the third day out about midnight, and nearly threw us all out of our berths, and careened the ship over so far that it seemed to take her ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... blindly across the wind with a thin trailing edge behind it and a rolling billow of descending mist as its forefront. It rolled up to and across a concrete highway, watched by perspiring motor cops who had performed miracles in clearing a path for it among the horde of sightseeing cars. It swept on into a spindling pine wood. Behind it lay a thinning ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... I caught at each sound; I clutched and I caught as a man that drown'd. . . . Only the sullen low growl of the sea Far out the flood street at the edge of the ships. Only the billow slow licking his lips, Like a dog that lay crouching there watching for me; Growling and showing white teeth all the night, Reaching his neck and as ready to bite— Only the waves with their salt flood tears Fawning white stones of a ...
— Mae Madden • Mary Murdoch Mason
... with haughty roar, Calms each wild wave and billow rude, Retreats submissive from the shore, And swells ...
— Hymns, Songs, and Fables, for Young People • Eliza Lee Follen
... 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 thy bridegroom ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... wail in the stress of my terror, and shrill is my cry of despair. The foemen roll forth from their camp as a billow, and onward they bear! Their horsemen are swift in the forefront, the dust rises up to the sky, A signal, though speechless, of doom, a herald more clear than a cry! Hoof-trampled, the land of my love bears onward the din to mine ears. As a torrent descending ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... of a boat:— There was once a boat on a billow: Lightly she rocked to her port remote, And the foam was white in her wake like snow, And her frail mast bowed when the breeze would blow, And bent like a ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... their gas—a great, thick, yellow billow of it pouring into our shell hole.... I couldn't get my mask on fast enough ... and here I am, Gray, wondering, but really knowing.... Are you stopping ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... held her hands upon me—then slowly opened her eyes. Out of them flashed the living soul of my Athanasia. She closed the lids again slowly over the lovely splendour; the water in which we stood rose around us; and on its last billow she floated away through the winding passage of the cave. I sought to follow her, but could not. I cried ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... Presently they were in the welter of white. Once when the little craft went completely out of sight behind a monster swell, Loll, watching from the cabin top, shouted in alarm, but yelled again in delight as it rose high on the same billow. ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... in his cabin only long enough to change his damp clothing for dry, when a fearful crash told him the ship had struck upon the rocks. In a moment he was back on the quarter deck. He found that a surging billow had struck the hinder part of the ship, tore off part of the sheathing, and carried away the watch-house in which two women were sleeping—all efforts to rescue them were in vain. Whilst the storm-tossed ocean raged and foamed around the devoted ship, and night shrouded ...
— Hair Breadth Escapes - Perilous incidents in the lives of sailors and travelers - in Japan, Cuba, East Indies, etc., etc. • T. S. Arthur
... no news for you, and am going to have less, for I a)n going into Norfolk. I have stayed till I have not one acquaintance left: the next billow washes me last off the plank. I have not cared to stir, for fear of news from Flanders; but I have convinced myself that there will be none. Our army is much superior to the Count de Saxe; besides, they have ten large towns to garrison, which will reduce their army to nothing; or ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... language. But when Bourqueney began to ask what he had to say to the fond, he only talked of the practical difficulties, and ended without saying anything the least promising or satisfactory, though nothing decidedly the reverse. Bourqueney had previously been with Billow, who is just come back, and who desires no better on the part of his Government than to join in any conciliatory measure we may adopt; and Esterhazy, who is expected every hour, will, he doubts not, be equally well disposed. But although such is the disposition ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... the soft voice of Undine was heard through the uproar; the moon emerged from the clouds; and by its light Undine was seen on the heights above the valley. She rebuked, she threatened the floods below her. The menacing and tower-like billow vanished, muttering and murmuring; the waters gently flowed away under the beams of the moon; while Undine, like a hovering white dove, flew down from the hill, raised the knight and Bertalda, and bore them to a green spot, where, by her earnest efforts, she soon ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... of Heaven O'er your grave! While the billow mournful rolls And the mermaid's song condoles, Singing—glory to the ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... window, stood, moon-gazing, In fairyland a guest; "On such a night," et cetera— See Shakespeare for much better a Description of the rest,— I mused, how sweet to wander Beside the river, yonder; And then the sudden whim Seized my head to pillow On Hudson's sparkling billow, A ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... only I could tell you something—" She broke off, lowered her head to her hand, and he saw her breast rise on a billow of emotion. ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... againe, yea, bade vs come a land: Whereof God knowes we were ful faine, when this we vnderstand. Each man bankes to his ore, to hale the boate a land: Where as we see vpon the shore, fiue hundred Negros stand. Our men rowing in a maine, the billow went so hie, That straight a waue ouerwhelms vs cleane and there in sea we lie. The Negros by and by, came swimming vs to saue: And brought vs all to land quickly, not one durst play the knaue. The Kings sonne ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, - and Discoveries of The English Nation, v5 - Central and Southern Europe • Richard Hakluyt
... on a billow of flame, But its light, like thine, is done: Life's tangled coil, with all its toil, Is ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... right beneath her bows, She drifted a dreary wreck, And a whooping billow swept the crew ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... 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, Till the ...
— Poems • Sam G. Goodrich
... on which are the scanty remains of the 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 of Trajan and Antonine. The Tiber flows ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... and sings! Pure, dew-dripping walls that guard The quiet, lovable, fertile fields, Sing praises to Him who from the mossy rocks Can bid the fountains leap in thirsty lands. I walk beside the stones through the young grain, Through waves of wheat that billow about my knees. The walls contest the onward march of the wheat; But the wheat is charged with the life of the world; Its force is irresistible; onward it sweeps, An engulfing tide, over all the land, Till hill and valley, field and plain Are flooded with its green felicity! Out of the moist earth ...
— The Song of the Stone Wall • Helen Keller
... the waters, mighty one— And stretch thee in the ocean's trough of brine; Turn thy wet scales up to the wind and sun, And toss the billow from thy flashing fin; Heave thy deep breathing to the ocean's din, And bound upon its ridges in thy pride, Or dive down to its lowest depths, and in The caverns where its unknown monsters hide Measure thy ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... wave and wind Have weightier blows in store, That we who keep the watch assigned Must stand to it the more; And as our streaming bows rebuke Each billow's baulked career, Sing, welcome Fate's discourtesy Whereby it is ...
— The Years Between • Rudyard Kipling
... javelin, and although already nearly half engulfed, with his arm alone above the water, he hurled it, a powerless weapon, against the unknown God whom he still braved from the depths of the abyss. A mighty billow, which rolled two or three times over the edge of the sea, ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... no flock at all! None, I mean, to be seen anywhere; only at one corner of the field, by the eastern end, where the snow drove in, a great white billow, as high as a barn, and as broad as a house. This great drift was rolling and curling beneath the violent blast, tufting and combing with rustling swirls, and carved (as in patterns of cornice) where the grooving chisel of the wind swept round. Ever and again the tempest snatched ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... The billow of white smoke filled the northern sky. A whirl of gray wood ashes, light as air, floated on and ever on over Superior. The site of the mill, the squares where the piles of lumber had stood, glowed incandescence over which already a ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... toll! O'er breeze and billow free; And with thy startling lore instruct Each rover of the sea. Tell how o'er proudest joys May swift destruction sweep, And bid him build his hopes on high— ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various
... himself on his face, coughed out the smoke he had swallowed, and caught one refreshing gasp of sweet air blowing up the tunnel. Then the fresh air was driven back by the huge billow of smoke, and the heavy clouds settled about Jack. He could not have moved now had he wished. He was the prey of the thick suffocating smoke, and a swift merciful unconsciousness fell upon him and put an end to the agonies he ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... the order. Enough of the bulwarks had been cut away to allow the passage of the boat. Mr. Carboy waited till a heavy billow swept over the deck of the brig, and then pushed her off into the boiling waves, leaping over the bow, as it cleared ...
— The Coming Wave - The Hidden Treasure of High Rock • Oliver Optic
... monotonous repetition of 'and,' 'and,' 'and,' gives the effect of an endless succession of the wares of sorrow, pain, and contumely which broke over that sacred head. We shall do best simply to note each billow as it breaks. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... red and kindling 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
... strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures. Yet what depths of the soul does Jonah's deep sealine sound! what a pregnant lesson to us is this prophet! What .. a noble thing is that canticle in the fish's belly! How billow-like and boisterously grand! We feel the floods surging over us; we sound with him to the kelpy bottom of the waters; sea-weed and all the slime of the sea is about us! But what is this lesson that ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... when she was in such imminent peril that not an eye was 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 it out safely, and the steady breeze caught ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... ground, and the towers just appear above the pitch of the roof, as though the good ship were bowing lazily over an Atlantic swell. At any moment it might be a hundred feet away from you, climbing the next billow. At any moment a window might open, and some old admiral thrust forth a cocked hat, and proceed to take an observation. The old admirals sail the sea no longer; the old ships of battle are all broken up, and live only in pictures; but this, that was a church before ever they were thought upon, ...
— An Inland Voyage • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sweet; But the 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 for men so deficient in ton I cannot ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... willow, the wild weeping willow, That murmurs a dirge to the rapturous days, And moans when the kiss of the breeze laden billow Entangles and dangles among the sad sprays! A musical ditty to scatter the sadness, A warble of wildness to banish its tears, Till tremulous measures of bountiful gladness Be sounding and bounding through all of ...
— Oklahoma and Other Poems • Freeman E. Miller
... 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 the ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... once that the wave 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 he was ...
— Harper's Young People, March 30, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... mariner to 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 ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... these ruins fired, nothing short of a miracle could save the remainder of the houses. Other stout fellows were upon the roofs with their buckets, emptying them as fast as they were filled upon the roofs and walls, so that when burning fragments and showers of sparks or even a leaping billow of flame smote upon them, it hissed like a live thing repulsed, and died away in ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... blown steadily for two days past from the south-east, had gone down into some ocean lair; but the sullen element refused to forget its late scourging, and occasionally a long swelling billow dashed itself into froth against the stone piers of the boat-house, and the cliffs which stood like a phantom fleet along the southern bend of the beach, were fringed with a white ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... 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 sickle in golden ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... soft! let us rest on the oar, And vex not a billow that sighs to the shore:— For sacred the spot where the starry waves meet With the beach, where the breath of the citron is sweet. There's a spell on the waves that now waft us along To the last of our Muses, ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... equilibrium which the least touch upsets, and fell to crying. It took her some time to get down the waves of emotion so that speech would live upon them. At last it ventured out,—showing at intervals, like the boat rising on the billow, sinking into the hollow, and climbing again ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the instant 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
... wise men bowling o'er the billow, Or him, less wise, Who chose rough bramble-bushes for a ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... worthy gentleman of Ephesus, and a most skilful physician, was standing by the sea-side, his servants brought to him a chest, which they said the sea-waves had thrown on the land. 'I never saw,' said one of them, 'so huge a billow as cast it on our shore.' Cerimon ordered the chest to be conveyed to his own house and when it was opened he beheld with wonder the body of a young and lovely lady; and the sweet-smelling spices and rich casket of jewels made him ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... as we hollow'd his narrow bed And smooth'd down his lonely pillow, That the foe and the stranger would tread o'er his head, And we far away on the billow! ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... they found in one of those, Where the cleft shore sea in his bosom takes, And 'twixt his stretched arms doth fold and close An ample bay, a rock the haven makes, Which to the main doth his broad back oppose, Whereon the roaring billow cleaves and breaks, And here and there two crags like turrets high, Point forth a port to all that ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... age, in those tropical climates, answers fully to a European one-and-twenty. In form, she was a perfect woman, light, rounded, and extremely active; all her motions were as graceful, and as undulating as the gently-swelling billow. If she moved quickly, she bounded; if slowly, she appeared to glide on effortless through space. She had taken her lessons of grace in the woods, and her gymnasium had been among the sportive billows of the ocean. It is but of little use me describing her face; for everyone supposes that, in ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... the German front was held by the right wing of the Second Army, once Von Billow's, but now commanded by Otto von Below a brother of Fritz von Below commanding the Eighth Army in the east. The area of Von Below's army in the Somme region began south of Monchy, while the Sixth Army under the Crown Prince of Bavaria lay due ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... mighty rock, that towered high above the masts, but this was only optical illusion, or, perhaps, a denser storm-cloud than usual passing by, for the steamer continued to plough her onward way unchecked, save, now and then, by the bursting on her bows of a monster billow, which caused her to quiver from stem to stern, and swept the decks with green seas fore and aft. One such sea had carried away part of the bulwarks, and swept overboard all the loose material on the decks. Presently, there was a slight diminution ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... sun is going down behind the line of distant buttes, throwing long shadows out across the grassy upland. Every crest and billow of the prairie is bathed in crimson and gold, while the "breaks" and ravines trending southward grow black and forbidding in their contrasted gloom. Far over to the southeast, in dazzling radiance, two lofty peaks, still snow-clad, gleam against the ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... resistance in the faubourg of Halle to the repeated attacks of General Blucher; while Marshal Ney calmly saw the combined forces of General Woronzow, the Prussian corps under the orders of General Billow, and the Swedish army, break themselves to pieces against his ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... island in 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! "how art thou fall'n, ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... 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, ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... crossing some scheme of the lawless moment, where disintegration is the sole unity of plan, and being ground up and destroyed for some no-idea of the Power of darkness. And then would be the time for the good—no, not to tremble, but to resolve with the Lord of light to endure all, to let every billow of evil dash and break upon him, nor do the smallest ill, tell the whitest lie for God—knowing that any territory so gained could belong to no kingdom of heaven, could be but a province of the kingdom of darkness. If there were two powers, the one of evil, ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... those gleaming sails. But the wind roared at them in his wrath and drove them away, so that they sank back, afraid to fight with him; and he took the ship in his strong arms, and bore her fast and far that night, through many a heaving billow, and past many a breaking crest—far over the untrodden paths, where footsteps are not, neither ...
— Doctor Claudius, A True Story • F. Marion Crawford
... showed to the Commandant the whale-boat balanced on the summit of an enormous wave, and apparently about to be flung against the wall of rock which—magnified in the flash—seemed frightfully near to them. The next instant Burgess himself—his boat lifted by the swiftly advancing billow—saw a wild waste of raging seas scooped into abysmal troughs, in which the bulk of a leviathan might wallow. At the bottom of one of these valleys of water lay the mutineers' boat, looking, with its outspread oars, like some six-legged insect floating in a pool of ink. The great cliff, whose every ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... sea-rover feareth 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
... vast storeys of darkness, behold, in the tower Of the heaven, the thunder! on stairways of cloudy commotion, Colossal of tread, like a giant, from echoing hour to hour Goes striding in rattling armor ... The Nymph, at her billow-roofed dormer Of foam; and the Sylvan—green-housed—at her window of leaves appears; —As a listening woman, who hears The approach of her lover, who comes to her arms in the night; And, loosening the loops of her locks, With eyes full of love and delight, From the couch of her rest in ardor and ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... the boy, as he again fell prostrate on the wet sail. A huge billow broke over the side of the boat, and deluged him with brine. He did not heed it, having again relapsed into his ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... have seen, When Ph[oe]bus hastens to his pillow, The mermaids, with their tresses green, Dancing upon the western billow: If you have seen, at twilight dim, When the lone spirit's vesper hymn Floats wild along the winding shore: If you have seen, through mist of eve, The fairy train their ringlets weave, Glancing along the spangled green;— If you have seen all this and more, ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... So did the dance. Wave followed on ripple, sea on wave, and on the sea the foaming, far-flung billow. Limb after limb, the whole supple body of the blind dancer came into play; yet there was no visible tension. Never dead, never hard, but limp,—as limp as flowing, rushing water,—she whirled and swayed ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... in circumstances in which the ripple passes into the wavelet, and the wavelet into the billow. On this head, as on all others, there is great value in the teachings of history; and the Free Church might be worse employed than in occasionally conning the lesson. Each fifty years of the last century and half has been marked by its own special questions of the ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... o'er, Whose antiquated graves Its still water laves On the shore. With an Indian's stealthy tread It goes sleeping in its bed, Without joy or grief, Or the rustle of a leaf, Without a ripple or a billow, Or the sigh of a willow, From the Lyndeboro' hills To the Merrimack mills. With a louder din Did its current begin, When melted the snow On the far mountain's brow, And the drops came together In ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... secured a life-buoy, moved close to the girl's side, and looking anxiously out ahead saw a faint line of foam in the thick darkness which had succeeded the explosion. Already the distant roar of the billow was heard, proving that it had ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... heard of, it would never have been wasted on a child. Miss Miranda 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. ...
— The Flag-raising • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... irruption of disturbing thoughts. "He that would swallow me up reproaches (me)." With this two-worded cry of pain—prolonged by the very unusual occurrence, in the middle of a verse, of the "Selah," which is probably a musical direction for the accompaniment—a billow of terror breaks over his soul; but its force is soon spent, and the hope, above which for a moment it had rolled, rises from the broken spray like some pillared light round which the surges dash in vain. "God shall send ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... mean! There was naething intill 't but a pennyworth o' blastin' pooder. It wadna blaw the froth aff o' the tap o' a jaw (billow)." ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... 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 ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... fitted with banks of oars. Sixty 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 confluence of streams.' That is hardly an exaggerated statement ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... Hellas, sees the lone sailor with his little craft from the heights of the mountain 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 ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... the 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 ...
— Pictures in Colour of the Isle of Wight • Various
... slope of the hillside they rose like one great rainbow-billow of foliage—bright yellow, red-rusty and bright fading green, all kinds and shades of brown and purple. Multitudes of leaves lay on the sides of the path, so many that I betook myself to my old childish amusement of walking in them without lifting my feet, driving whole armies of them with ocean-like ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... for in the fallacious hope of seeing in the other world her who had so lately departed from this, every instant the galley delayed to founder or drive ashore was to me an age of agony. I watched every billow that dashed by us and over us, to see if they bore the body of the unfortunate Leonisa. I will not detain you, Mahmoud, with a recital of the tortures that distracted my soul in that long and bitter night; it is enough to say that they were such ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... 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 ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... the Pharaohs. On the one side, far as the eye can reach, and for hundreds of miles beyond, a desert of glistening sand is spread before us, for the most part level and unbroken, but occasionally interrupted by billow-like undulations, resembling the ground swell at sea. Here and there a salt pond breaks the monotonous ochre of the sand. These ponds are, in the majority of cases, quite dry, and encrusted with a beautiful crystalline ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... tasks are indeed admirable, which could keep up so prolonged and so majestic a stream of original and varied poetical melody. If his stanzas are monotonous, it is with the grand monotony of the seashore, where billow follows billow, each swelling diversely, and broken into different curves and waves upon its mounting surface, till at last it falls over, and spreads and rushes up in a last long line of foam ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... behold the surf Lit by the sun into gold, Curl and glitter and gleam, In a ring-like billow rolled, But I think of another ring, A simple, delicate band, That in the night of our troth I placed on ...
— Stories in Verse • Henry Abbey
... flutter of wind riffling through the Pass sucking up the mists forewarned dawn. He had climbed the roll of stone slowly, picking each step, for, perhaps, two-hundred feet, when that trail sense of feel made him stoop to examine the ground. The roll of moraine he had climbed met another stone billow; and between the two ran a groove, a little narrow hardened tracing where the tracks of game going to and from watering place had packed and worked in between the rolling pebbles the ice dust of a ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... dropp'd the cruel fiend. Thus we, descending to the fourth steep ledge, Gain'd on the dismal shore, that all the woe Hems in of all the universe. Ah me! Almighty Justice! in what store thou heap'st New pains, new troubles, as I here beheld! Wherefore doth fault of ours bring us to this? E'en as a billow, on Charybdis rising, Against encounter'd billow dashing breaks; Such is the dance this wretched race must lead, Whom more than elsewhere numerous here I found, From one side and the other, with loud voice, Both roll'd on weights ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... was scarcely spoken before the enormous billow, a monstrous wave forty feet high, broke over the fugitives with a fearful noise. Men and animals all disappeared in a whirl of foam; a liquid mass, weighing several millions of tons, engulfed them in ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... but the men behaved steadily and well; and through it we went, dancing along like a cork in a mill-pond; at last one huge roller caught us, all hands gave way, and we were hurried along on the top of the swelling billow, which then suddenly fell under us and broke; in a moment after we had grounded, and although still upwards of two hundred yards from the shore, we all jumped out to haul the boat up, but ere we could move our heavily laden whaler beyond a few yards breaker ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... with three horses harnessed to our vessel, like the steeds of Neptune to a huge scallop-shell in mythological pictures. Bound to a distant port, we had neither chart nor compass, nor cared about the wind, nor felt the heaving of a billow, nor dreaded shipwreck, however fierce the tempest, in our adventurous navigation of an interminable mudpuddle; for a mudpuddle it seemed, and as dark and turbid as if every kennel in the land paid contribution to it. With an imperceptible current, it holds its drowsy ...
— Sketches From Memory (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Where may the billow of life be sporting with the impulsive youth whom tender feeling and wild fate vehemently dragged ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... one huge 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 that swashed ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn |
