"Rampart" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Thames in ninety-four war vessels, eager to plunder the wealthy London of the Saxons. The brave burghers, trained to handle spear and sword, beat back, however, the hungry foemen from their walls—the rampart that tough Roman hands had reared, and the strong tower which Alfred had seen arise on the eastern bank ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... to carry the double ladders, for the walls were high, and others were told off to bring up the fascines, and so, leaving our main battle to wait out of shot, and come on as they were needed, the Maid and Pothon ran up the first rampart, she waving her standard and crying that all was ours. As we ran, for I must needs be by her side, the din of bells and guns was worse than I had heard at Orleans, and on the top of the church towers were men-at-arms waving flags, as if for a signal. Howbeit, we sprang into the fosse, under shield, ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... enemy, they were met by a succession of fresh troops coming from the rear to extend the lines. When encamped, the troops were to assume the form of a hollow square, with the baggage and cavalry, and sometimes the light infantry and riflemen, in the center. A rampart of logs was to be placed around the camp, to prevent a sudden night attack, and to give the troops time to get under arms, but this rampart was not intended as a means of defense in daylight. "To defeat Indians by regular troops, the charge must be relied upon; the ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... Anderson did not consider his small force safe within this fortification. It is overlooked by neighboring sand-hills and by the houses of Moultrieville, which closely surround it on the land side, while its ditch is so narrow and its rampart so low that a ladder of twenty-five feet in length would reach from the outside of the former to the summit of the latter. A fire of sharp-shooters from the commanding points, and two columns of attack, would have crushed the feeble ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... the river Loire, Orleans lies on your right hand. It had strong walls, towers on the wall, and a bridge of many arches crossing to the left side of the river. At the further end of this bridge were a fort and rampart called Les Tourelles, and this fort had already been taken by the English, so that no French army could cross the bridge to help Orleans. The rampart and the fort of Les Tourelles were guarded by ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... it appeared to us, of future islands. Thus, on this reef, we came to perceive how most of the small islands of those seas are formed. On one part we saw the spray of the breaker washing over the rocks, and millions of little, active, busy creatures continuing the work of building up this living rampart. At another place, which was just a little too high for the waves to wash over it, the coral insects were all dead; for we found that they never did their work above water. They had faithfully completed the mighty work which their Creator had given them to do, and they ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... the watery plain; or Gaurus huge Split from his summit to his base, were plunged In fathomless Avernus' stagnant pool. The billows thus unstemmed, 'twas Caesar's will To hew the stately forests and with trees Enchained to form a rampart. Thus of old (If fame be true) the boastful Persian king Prepared a way across the rapid strait 'Twixt Sestos and Abydos, and made one The European and the Trojan shores; And marched upon the waters, wind and storm Counting as nought, but trusting his emprise To one frail bridge, so ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... alliances, and he must diplomatize; and the German is a strong one; a relative too; he is the Saxon's cousin, to say the least. This German has the habit of pushing past politeness to carry his argumentative war into the enemy's country: and he presents on all sides a solid rampart of recent great deeds done, and mailed readiness for the doing of more, if we think of assailing him in that way. We are really like the poor beasts which have cast their shells or cases, helpless flesh to his beak. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... wind would rush up against the window in fierce attack, as if the creatures that rode by upon the blast had seen the row of white faces, and it angered them to be thus stared at, and they rode their airy steeds full tilt against the thin rampart of glass that protected the human weaklings from becoming ...
— Adela Cathcart - Volume II • George MacDonald
... entrance of this house was in the Place Baudoyer: it was tolerably large, surrounded by gardens, inclosed in the street Saint-Jean by the shops of tool-makers, which protected it from prying looks, and was walled in by a triple rampart of stone, noise, and verdure, like an embalmed mummy in its triple coffin. The man we have just alluded to walked along with a firm step, although he was no longer in his early prime. His dark cloak and long sword plainly revealed one who seemed ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... no words to give the essential simplicity of it. It is the rampart put up by Man against the Beast, precisely as in the Stone Age. If it goes, all that keeps us from the Beast goes with it. One sees this at the front as clearly as one sees the French villages behind the German lines. Sometimes people steal away from them and bring ...
— France At War - On the Frontier of Civilization • Rudyard Kipling
... comrades—each of us heavily laden. In addition to our guns and ammunition, we carried our saddles and mule-packs, our blankets and buffalo-robes. It was not their intrinsic value that tempted us to take this trouble with our impedimenta: our object was to make with them a rampart upon the rock. We had just time for a second trip; and, flinging our first loads up to the table, we rushed back down the declivity. Each seized upon such objects as offered themselves—valises, the ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... think what we shall do," he says. "A Roman army sits round Pompey and makes him a prisoner within valley and rampart—and shall we live? The city stands; the Praetors give the law, the AEdiles keep up the games, good men look to their principal and their interest. Shall I remain sitting here? Shall I rush hither and thither madly, and implore the credit of the towns? Men of substance will not follow me. ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... the night of the 10th, a large force doubled back on Candahar and made a furious attack on the gates, one of which they set on fire and tore down. The garrison were hard-pressed, but fought valiantly for three hours behind an improvised rampart, and eventually drove off the enemy. Nott was not able to return to Candahar till the 12th, but it was now free from the enemy. Here he had to stay waiting for ammunition and supplies, which eventually reached him, escorted by a force under Sir R. England, ...
— Our Soldiers - Gallant Deeds of the British Army during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... ladder or fascine upon the field. The 44th, which was appointed to carry them, had either misunderstood or neglected their orders; and now headed the column of attack, without any means being provided for crossing the enemy's ditch or scaling his rampart. ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... grew fast, and David left him in Kachiswan with his grandparents, and took Chandud-Chanum with him to Sassun. The men of Chlat[29] heard David's coming and they assembled an army, built a rampart, formed their wagons into a fortress, and began to give battle. When Chandud-Chanum sent her lance against the wall she shattered it and the wagons flew seven leagues away. Then David went forward and drove the fighters away, ...
— Armenian Literature • Anonymous
... like all others, though big with happiness to me, at last was fading away. While sitting with our faces looking to the east, as Livingstone had been sitting for days preceding my arrival, we noted the dark shadows which crept up above the grove of palms beyond the village, and above the rampart of mountains which we had crossed that day, now looming through the fast approaching darkness; and we listened, with our hearts full of gratitude to the Great Giver of Good and Dispenser of all Happiness, to the sonorous ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... she said, the sunset dilating through her tears, "don't you see that I can bear to think such things only because they're impossibilities? It's easy to look over into the depths if one has a rampart to lean on. What I most pity poor Arthur for is that, instead of that woman lying there, so dreadfully dead, there might have been a girl like me, so exquisitely alive because of him; but it seems ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton
... Rolf appeared above on the rampart; a consecrated taper in his lantern shone down into the moat, as he sought for the missing young knight. "In God's name, Sir Sintram," he called out, "what has the spectre of whom you slew on Niflung's Heath, and whom I never could bury, ...
— Sintram and His Companions • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... Vienna is not very large, since you can walk round its circumference on the ramparts in two hours. It was formerly fortified, but the French blew up the fortifications, leaving only the rampart; and by so doing they did a thing of great utility for the Viennese, and gave to the Austrian government an excellent opportunity of joining the old town to the magnificent faubourgs, by filling up the esplanade which separates them with streets and squares, which ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... learning the condition of affairs had the senate make Severus an enemy and proceeded to prepare against him. [In the suburbs he constructed a rampart, wherein he set gates, that he might take up a position there outside and fight from that base.] The City during these days became nothing more nor less than a camp, pitched, as it were, in hostile territory. ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume V., Books 61-76 (A.D. 54-211) • Cassius Dio
... the whole, is the most considerable: an essay of very moving poignancy, telling the emotion of the writer during the earliest months of the War, in "the most beautiful English summer conceivable," months that he "was to spend so much of in looking over from the old rampart of a little high-perched Sussex town at the bright blue streak of the Channel ... and staring at the bright mystery beyond the rim of the farthest opaline reach." In the thoughts to which HENRY JAMES here gives expression one may find much of the love and ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... interest in what is really a study of successful egotism. From the moment when, in the first chapter, we encounter Dorothy (whose real name was Norah) washing her hair at a window in Lonsdale Road, an eligible cul-de-sac ending in a railway line, beyond which a high rampart marked the reverse of the Earl's Court Exhibition panorama, to that final page on which we take leave of her as a widowed countess, sacrificing her future for the sake of an Earl's Court of a different genre, her career, sentimental, financial and matrimonial, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 19, 1920 • Various
... the Save in all its peaceful smoothness; looking out of the window, I perceived that the high rampart, on which the kiosk was constructed, was built at a distance of thirty or forty yards from the water, and that the intervening space was covered with boats, hauled up high and dry, and animated with the process of building and repairing ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... fortification is a solid piece of masonry, enormously thick and of great height; its two extremities being surmounted by pointed towers, connected by a covered walk along the top of the wall, which, even at that height, is fully six feet wide and nearly a hundred in length. This was the rampart behind which the Greifensteins had dwelt in security through many generations, in the stormy days of the robber barons. So sure were they of their safety, that they had built their dwelling-place on the other side of the bulwark in a manner that offered no suggestion ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... was heard, not a funeral note, As his corpse to the rampart we hurried; Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot O'er the grave where our hero ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various
... shall rise, And, with its fragrant blossoms, scent the skies! Then round this little favour'd isle, I'll bring, With gentle windings, yonder silver spring; While eglantine and thorn shall interpose Their hedge, a rampart 'gainst invading foes— Lest sheep and rambling goats the place annoy, And spoil the promise of our future joy. Oh then approach, ye favour'd of the loves! Come and dwell here ye gentle turtle doves! On yonder spreading branches, perch'd on high, With coos repeated greet ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... of the Algerian coast is severe and inhospitable. The western half is bordered by a hilly rampart, broken only here and there, in the bays where the larger streams find their outlet, by flat and sandy plains. Between Dellys and Philippeville high mountains rise almost sheer from the sea, leaving only a narrow strip ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... wheels, and of enormous strength and dimensions, were constructed and placed on the walls at the spot where it was expected the sow would make its approach. In addition to this, they fixed a crane upon the rampart, armed with iron chains and grappling hooks, and large masses of combustibles and fire-faggots, shaped like tuns, and composed of pitch and flax, bound strongly together with tar ropes, were piled up in readiness for the attack. At different intervals on the walls were fixed the espringalds for ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 569 - Volume XX., No. 569. Saturday, October 6, 1832 • Various
... The Egyptian annals make mention of their incursions at the very commencement of history, and they maintained that even the gods had to take steps to protect themselves from them. The Gulf of Suez and the mountainous rampart of Gebel Geneffeh in the south, and the marshes of Pelusium on the north, protected almost completely the eastern boundary of the Delta; but the Wady Tumilat laid open the heart of the country to the invaders. The Pharaohs of the divine dynasties in the first ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... plateau rests upon high calcareous walls there was no need of a fortification. But elsewhere, where the position was accessible from the valley, it was protected by a strong wall. On the northern side this rampart can be followed for a considerable distance without a break. In one spot the soil which has collected about it has been dug away, leaving the masonry bare. It is not composed of loose stones of various sizes, like that of the Celtic city at Murcens, but of small flat stones neatly laid together, ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... wasted, not a morsel had we tasted, And our heads were almost splitting with the cannons' deafening thrill, When a figure tall and stately round the rampart strode sedately; It was PRESCOTT, one since told me; he commanded ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)
... which, even in midsummer, never entirely disappears at altitude ten thousand feet, they could look away westward over a billowing sea of mountain and mesa and valley breaking in far-distant, crystalline space against the mighty rampart of the Wasatch range, two hundred and ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... added to our courage all it lessened of our comfort, because it proved that the robbers were not in the habit of passing there. And we knew that we could not go astray, so long as we breasted the hill before us; inasmuch as it formed the rampart, or side-fence of Glen Doone. But in truth I used the right word there for the manner of our ascent, for the ground came forth so steep against us, and withal so woody, that to make any way we must throw ourselves forward, and labour as at ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... 1794. Pontmercy fought at Spire, at Worms, at Neustadt, at Turkheim, at Alzey, at Mayence, where he was one of the two hundred who formed Houchard's rearguard. It was the twelfth to hold its ground against the corps of the Prince of Hesse, behind the old rampart of Andernach, and only rejoined the main body of the army when the enemy's cannon had opened a breach from the cord of the parapet to the foot of the glacis. He was under Kleber at Marchiennes and at the battle of Mont-Palissel, where a ball from a biscaien broke his arm. Then ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... surrounded the outermost field; then turning his head looked again at the heath, its bleak contours mounting gradually till they showed an ugly ridge beyond which the downs swelled up soft and vague against the hanging curtain of clouds. And he thought of what lay on the far side of this long grass rampart of down country—the fat-soiled valley, the other railway line, the trains from the West of England, full of queer people, running by night as ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... her of political corruption beyond belief; of cheating, lying, trickery and greed, for power. Of war, he told her, and made all its inner, hideous motives clear. She seemed verily to see the trenches, the "red rampart's slippery edge," the spattered blood and brains and all the horror of Hell's nethermost infamy—and then the blasted, wrecked and wasted homes, the long trail of mourning and of hopeless ruin—the horror of this crime of crimes, all for profit, ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... the causeway of Leith Walk would have been more pleasant to me but for this encounter. The old rampart ran among fields, the like of them I had never seen for artfulness of agriculture; I was pleased, besides, to be so far in the still countryside; but the shackles of the gibbet clattered in my head; and the mops and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the assault manfully, retiring slowly, until at length, upon the brow of a small hill, they turned at bay, and for a time formed a living rampart between their retreating comrades and the enemy. Every attempt to approach and penetrate their line proved instant death to their assailants, and General Stuart, seeing no chance of otherwise dislodging them, determined to charge in person, and crush them with an entire division. Glazier, ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... to Cuba this time I had read in our newspapers about the Spanish trocha without knowing just what a trocha was. I imagined it to be a rampart of earth and fallen trees, topped with barbed wire; a Rubicon that no one was allowed to pass, but which the insurgents apparently crossed at will with the ease of little girls leaping over a flying skipping rope. In reality it seems to be a much more important piece of engineering than ...
— Cuba in War Time • Richard Harding Davis
... Switzerland, the Rhenish States, and the Netherlands. Russian policy, subversive under Catharine, was in a European sense conservative under Alexander. Then the most damaging thrusts to the European fabric came from Vienna and St. Petersburg. Now they came from Paris. Pitt therefore sought to construct a rampart out of the weak States bordering on France. As the Barrier Treaties of a century earlier were directed against Louis XIV, so now Pitt sought to inaugurate an enlarged Barrier policy as a safeguard against ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... few miles beyond Karyetein we passed close by a desperate battle in progress between the Giath and Amour Arabs, and a powerful caravan proceeding from Baghdad to Damascus. The camels of the caravan were formed into a circular rampart, the head of one camel being made fast to the next; and from behind this living rampart the hardy villagers, who were bringing provisions for their families from beyond the Euphrates, defended themselves throughout a long summer day—the sound of the battle ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... say, can you see, by the dawn's early light, What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming? Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight, O'er the rampart we watched, were so gallantly streaming, And the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air, Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there, Oh! say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave O'er the land of the free and the home of ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... for instance, is a central volcano, being the central point of the volcanic group to which the eruption of Palma and Landerote may be referred. The long, rampart-like chain of the Andes, which is sometimes single, and sometimes divided into two or three parallel branches, connected by various transverse ridges, presents, from the south of Chili to the northwest coast of America, one of the grandest instances of a continental volcanic ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... years of age he received his first lesson in horsemanship, on a wooden steed constructed for his especial use by Jean Rampart, ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... small pigs had been adrift, to the mortal peril of our corn, lettuce, onions, etc., and as I stood smarting on the back verandah, behold the three piglings issuing from the wood just opposite. Instantly I got together as many boys as I could - three, and got the pigs penned against the rampart of the sty, till the others joined; whereupon we formed a cordon, closed, captured the deserters, and dropped them, squeaking amain, into their strengthened barracks where, please ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... for a shovel, which would have been perfectly useless, but to explain the situation and assist in turning round the sleighs. In front of Colonel Rolleston was a huge rampart of snow, extending for some distance. The wind setting dead in that direction, had drifted it across, and buried the track several feet. This road had been clear the day before, for Bertie and Cecil had driven it to ascertain, but the wind ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... we'll go there. O Arnold, death is nothing; Our lives are forfeit to our country's cause. Which of us would not quit the world in peace After some act that scaled the walls of time, And stood on the rampart? ...
— The Treason and Death of Benedict Arnold - A Play for a Greek Theatre • John Jay Chapman
... sixty, and the highest one hundred and twenty cubits in height. But, in the vicinity of the gate of Benjamin, the wall arose by no means from the margin of the fosse. On the contrary, between the level of the ditch and the basement of the rampart sprang up a perpendicular cliff of two hundred and fifty cubits, forming part of the precipitous Mount Moriah. So that when Simeon and his associates arrived on the summit of the tower called Adoni-Bezek-the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... down. Its track can be discerned even in this light by the undulations of the withered grass-bents—the only produce of this upland summit except moss. Four minutes of ascent, and a vantage-ground of some sort is gained. It is only the crest of the outer rampart. Immediately within this a chasm gapes; its bottom is imperceptible, but the counterscarp slopes not too steeply to admit of a sliding descent if cautiously performed. The shady bottom, dank and chilly, is thus gained, and reveals itself ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... Russian batteries a few toises, When up the bristling Moslem rose at last, Answering the Christian thunders with like voices: Then one vast fire, air, earth, and stream embraced, Which rocked as 't were beneath the mighty noises; While the whole rampart blazed like Etna, when The restless Titan hiccups in ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... at fixed prices, are multiplying rapidly and taking the bread from the mouth of the poor hawker. But the snake-charmer seems safe from that kind of competition. It is difficult to forecast a time when a broad signboard in Rampart Row will invite the passer-by to visit Mr. Nagshett's world-renowned Serpent Tamasha, Mungoose and Cobra Fight, Mango-tree Illusion, etc. ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... wished.] Macrinus had no opportunity to think it over, but, meeting the enemy already on the way to Nisibis, was defeated in a battle begun by the soldiers about water, while encamped opposite each other. And he came very near losing the rampart itself, but some armor-bearers and baggage-carriers happened along and saved it. In their confidence, they had started out ahead and made a rush upon the barbarians; and the unexpectedness of their sally was of ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol VI. • Cassius Dio
... 400,000 men is probably approximately correct. Somewhere about January 23, 1914, after a period of thaw and mud the weather settled down to snow and hard frost. Then the machine began to move. A snow-clad mountain rampart lay spread before; over 200 miles of its length embraced the area of the projected operations. Here we may leave this army for a while in order to review some of the political and strategic considerations underlying the campaign, which is ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... rain before day. The sleeping, worn men woke with muttered oaths and stood against the trees or squatted against their trunks seeking shelter from the flood. As the mists lifted, they looked with grim foreboding but still desperate courage to the heights. Every rampart was deserted. Not one of those three hundred and forty guns remained. McClellan had withdrawn his army under the cover of ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... they were leaving behind, their minds fixed on the distant Isles of Philip. Tom had never expected to leave the campus in that spirit. He loved it all, from the quiet slopes by Frenchman's Lake to that lofty redwood treetop, first rampart of the smiling city to the eager Freshman, last long-watched glimpse of the land of his ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... dream and longing of many years fulfilled, the first rays of the rising sun had just touched the heights, while the town below was still hid in gloom. Rock, and rampart, and ruined fanes—all were colored in uniform tints; the lights were of a deep rich orange, and the shadows of dark crimson, with the deeper lines of purple. There was no variety in color between what nature ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... their carriages, were to be seen, near the dismembered or disembowelled bodies of the beasts that had drawn them. Dead horse or mule or bullock, decomposing in the sun, seemed to have nothing of offence for Republican noses. The yellow smear of lyddite was everywhere, and, looking over the rock-rampart upon the works below, you saw it like a blight, or yolk of egg spilt upon ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... State, the thought of individuals against the practice of ages, neither authorities, nor minorities, nor majorities can command implicit obedience; and, where there has been long and arduous experience, a rampart of tried conviction and accumulated knowledge, where there is a fair level of general morality, education, courage, and self-restraint, there, if there only, a society may be found that exhibits the condition of life ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... steep escarpment her waving standards of green. It sometimes seems as if one can almost see her selecting the easiest point of attack, marshalling her forces, running her parallels with Boadicea-like skill, and carrying her streaming banners, more real than Macbeth's "Birnam-Wood" to crowning rampart and lofty parapet. ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... the rampart walls a glance Of the air his steed assumes; His proud neck swells, his glad hoofs prance, And on his head unceasing dance, In a gorgeous tuft, ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... our way toward the castle at the south side of the town, but were prevented from entering by a guard of feudal retainers, who looked as if they had been well drilled. They were as solemn as the vultures that sat perched along the rampart overlooking a great artificial moat dividing the town from the high hill ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... a distant drum came from a rampart, and the Secretary raised his head, as if the sound gave a new turn to ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... longitudinal or fore and aft steel bulkhead 3/8 in. thick had been worked to a length of 61 ft., and, with the coal with which the intervening compartment was packed, formed (as in recent armorclads) a solid rampart, 20 ft. high, for the defense ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 601, July 9, 1887 • Various
... place, (in Isaiam, t. 4, p. 294:) "The faithful arm and intrench themselves with the sign of the cross, overthrowing and breaking by it the power, and every assault of the devils: for the cross is to us an impregnable rampart." In this sixth book he produces the open acknowledgment of Julian that the heathenish oracles had all ceased; but this he ascribed to old age and length of time. St. Cyril shows the extravagance of this supposition, and that the true reason was, because the power of the devil had ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... the rebels besieged Exeter: and right valiantly the men of Exeter kept their town. [King Edward, from whose Diary these details are taken, spells these names Honington and Outrie.] The rebels burnt the gates, but those within "kept them off by hot fire, till they had made a rampart; and when they were undermined, they drowned the mine and the powder with water." The Lord Privy Seal, hearing of their bravery, endeavoured to go round a bye-way to reinforce them; but the rebels, having spies, discovered his movements, and cut down all ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... sandbag, revetment; earth work, field- work; fence, wall dead wall, contravallation^; paling &c (inclosure) 232; palisade, haha, stockade, stoccado^, laager^, sangar^; barrier, barricade; boom; portcullis, chevaux de frise [Fr.]; abatis, abattis^, abbatis^; vallum^, circumvallation^, battlement, rampart, scarp; escarp^, counter-scarp; glacis, casemate^; vallation^, vanfos^. buttress, abutment; shore &c (support) 215. breastwork, banquette, curtain, mantlet^, bastion, redan^, ravelin^; vauntmure^; advance work, horn work, outwork; barbacan^, barbican; redoubt; fort-elage ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... narrow as a band of silver; it sought the Los Angeles hill, crossing barren fields and humble districts, finally to curve and lose itself in the grey horizon. Towering above Madrid the Guadarrama loomed like a lofty blue rampart, its summits ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... Danes were grateful to Queen Thyra for this splendid wall of defense and sang her praises in their national hymns, while they told wonderful tales of her cleverness in ruling the land while her husband was far away. Fragments of Thyra's rampart still remain and its remains formed the groundwork of all the later ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris
... and a favorable reference in this order was made to Captain Porter's plan. On the morning of the 24th of April, at three o'clock, the fleet got under weigh. The steam gunboats of the flotilla ran up close to the western fort and engaged the water battery and the rampart guns, and from the mortar vessels a shower of shells was thrown into the besieged work. This bombardment made it impossible for the leaders of the enemy to keep their men on the ramparts. Three times they broke, although they were twice driven back to their guns at the point of the bayonet. From ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... settlers used to be astounded by the inroads of the northern Indians coming down upon them from this mountain rampart through some defile known only to themselves. It is, indeed, a wondrous path. A demon, it might be fancied, or one of the Titans, was travelling up the valley, elbowing the heights carelessly aside as he passed, till at length a great mountain took its stand directly across his intended ...
— The Great Stone Face - And Other Tales Of The White Mountains • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... every step, until we actually came within sight of the gate by which the fugitives were making their escape into the town. But we were in a trap, and soon felt that we were discovered, by a heavy discharge of musketry from the rampart. We had now only to return on our steps, and I had just given the word, when the firing was renewed on a bastion, round which we were hurrying in the twilight. I felt a sudden shock, like that of electricity, which struck me ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... rifles as aids like alpenstocks. Not a word is spoken. It is hard to understand how so many men can move with so little noise. The silence is that which precedes all dreadful noises. It is ominous, terrible. Scarcely twenty feet more, and the foremost will reach the rampart. Haste! ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... attaches to the second of his cities. The ruins stand in lat. 31 deg. 19', long. 45 deg. 40', about four miles from the nearest bend of the Euphrates, on its left or east bank. They form an irregular circle, nearly six miles in circumference, which is defined by the traces of an earthen rampart, in some places forty feet high. A vast mass of undulating mounds, intersected by innumerable channels and ravines, extends almost entirely across the circular space, in a direction, which is nearly north and south, ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... last the gentlemen began to make a show of leaving. But then came a lively chat, all standing in a bunch. To-morrow's procession, the visitors said, would form in Canal Street, move up St. Charles, return down Camp Street into Canal, pass through it into Rampart, take the Bayou Road and march to a grand review away out in the new camp of instruction at the Creole Race-Course. Intermediately, from a certain Canal Street balcony, Flora would present the flag! the gorgeous golden, silken, satin battle standard which the Callenders ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... from Rome as though they would build them a city of their own. So they departed, marching to a certain place that men call the Sacred Hill, that is distant from the city about three miles, and is on the other side of the river Anio. There they made a camp with trench and rampart, and abode in this place many days, doing nothing either for good or evil. But when the nobles saw what had been done, they were in great fear what this thing might mean, but doubted not that Rome must be brought to destruction, unless the rich and the poor should be reconciled the one ...
— Stories From Livy • Alfred Church
... laired in the place, and had left their smell there together with an air of wilderness. But now a new-old smell, and new-old sounds were awakening the past. There were horses again in the stables, whose roof formed the fighting-platform behind the rampart of the outer wall. ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... a sentimental importance in the eyes of the Prussian nobility. The Prussian Royal House, in particular, had toward this country an especial regard. Moreover, it was regarded by the Germans as a whole as their rampart against the Slav, a proof of the German power to withstand the dreaded Russian. That this sacred soil should now be in the hands of a Cossack army was not to be borne. The ...
— History of the World War - An Authentic Narrative of the World's Greatest War • Francis A. March and Richard J. Beamish
... The springs are unbound— The floods break their prison, And ravin around. No rampart withstands 'em, Their fury will last, Till the Sign that commands 'em Sinks low ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... and that one was a watch-tower only [Footnote: Thus literally was fulfilled the promise to St. Mark,—Pax e.] from first to last, while the palaces of the other cities of Italy were lifted into sullen fortitudes of rampart, and fringed with forked battlements for the javelin and the bow, the sands of Venice never sank under the weight of a war tower, and her roof terraces were wreathed with Arabian imagery, of golden globes suspended on the leaves of lilies. [Footnote: The inconsiderable ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... are small, and set deep in a bony socket, but I judged them to be vulnerable, and it was upon the eyes of the beast that I made my attack. The decks were slippery with the horrid slime of them. The crew surged about in their battling, and, moreover, constantly offered themselves as a rampart before me by reason of Tob, the captain's threats. But I gave a few shrewd progues with the lance to show that I did not choose my will to be overridden, and presently was given room ...
— The Lost Continent • C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne
... serve the South was to sneak through the lines to Texas. The telegraph was completed in October, 1861. The government had then daily tidings from the loyal sentinels calling "All's well," on fort and rampart, from San Juan Island to ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... city there now reared a new rampart, rising above the tree-fern tops: there was a wall of the Death Mist encompassing the city. No living thing could enter or leave the city without passing through that cloud. And at Tommy's order it moved forward to the very encampments ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... grass-covered rampart which encircles Copenhagen lies a great red house. Balsams and other flowers greet us from the long rows of windows in the house, whose interior is sufficiently poverty-stricken; and poor and old are the people who inhabit it. The ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... as if he had been a reigning king, and his ashes shall be sent to Ostia and Rome in the costliest specimen of Vasa murrina that graces my treasure-house, and on a ship specially fitted, and escorted by the noblest of my friends. The road to the rampart of a hostile city lies over corpses, and I, as general ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... was surrounded by a rampart, each face of which was three hundred feet long. About the middle of each face the rampart became a semicircle, the inner diameter of which was ninety feet. The height of the rampart was twenty-two feet, and its thickness at the base twenty. Its four angles ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... slightly sloping, was defended by embrasures between which the archer could place himself in safety, in an angle of the stonework, so soon as he had shot his arrow. The interior wall was also crested with battlements. The curvilinear rampart did not present projecting angles, the salients of which, Vitruvius tells us, could not resist the repeated blows of the siege machinery of those days. It was intersected by nine towers, of three vaulted stories ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... in Devonshire. It stands on a hill a thousand feet above the sea, commanding a view of the coast from Porlock to Heddon's Mouth, with the line of the Welsh coast opposite; it consists of a triple rampart and fosse, rising boldly one within the other, with a gate cut in the northern face of the rampart, and with a small mound exactly in the centre of the inner camp. How did these peoples of the Celtic speech build a work of such engineering magnitude, without the tools ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... area he had already dropped out of the chill wind that struck them at ten thousand. Behind them and off to the right was the gray rampart of the Sierra. Ahead a rough circle of darker hills enclosed the great bowl he had learned ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... which suggested the Old World rather than the New. The streets which ran at right angles were reminiscent of the old regime: Conde, Conti, Dauphine, St. Louis, Chartres, Bourbon, Orleans—all these names were to be found within the earthen rampart which formed the defense ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... coming foe, wheeling round, as the hawk on the heron;—halted, drew up his few men in a semicircle, with their large shields as a rampart, and their levelled spears as a palisade; and before them all, as a tower, stood Harold with his axe. In a minute more he was surrounded; and through the rain of javelins that poured upon him, hissed and glittered the sword of Gryffyth. But Harold, more practised than the Sire de Graville ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... angles of the fortress—an artilleryman with a lighted match at his side—the director watched their approach. At this moment the two domines Megapolensis, imploring him not to begin hostilities, led Stuyvesant from the rampart, who then, with a hundred of the garrison, went into the city to resist the landing of the English. Hoping on against hope, the director now sent Counsellor de Decker, Secretary Van Ruyven, Burgomaster Steenwyck, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 12 • Editor-In-Chief Rossiter Johnson
... and she fell towards him. He stretched out his arm and held her firm and secure. He wanted her to feel that it was a rampart and not an insidious outpost of passion ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... no more than I had expected of them. All of us hate to be caught bending. Berry especially. That artist was busily fashioning a miniature rampart of sand. He looked up at my greeting, ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... defending, maintenance; guard, protection, palisade, rampart, bulwark, fortress, blockhouse, fortification, earthwork, breastwork, shield, armor, stockade, buckler, redoubt, remblai, palladium, garrison, ravelin, reliance, muniment, machicolation; vindication, advocacy, plea, excuse. Antonyms: betrayal, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... abruptness. It was as though Nature had grown her forest within the confines of a field embraced by an imaginary hedge. There were no outskirts, no dwindling away. It ended in one clean-cut line. And beyond lay the rampart hills, fringed and patched with disheveled bluff, split by rifts and yawning chasms. And ever they rose higher and higher as the distance gained, and, though summer was not yet at its height, it was gaunt-looking, torn, ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... so deeply impressed upon the world from the Athenian Timon downwards, that a downfall of this kind instantly cuts all ties. She was aware, on the contrary, that a great deal of kindness, sympathy, and attempts to aid were always called forth on such occasions; that the women used to form a sort of rampart around the ruined with tears and outcries, and that the men had anxious meetings and consultations and were constantly going to see some one or other upon the affairs of the downfallen. Bice had not seen in her experience that poverty ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... but those walls have girded in great ages, And sent forth mighty spirits. The past earth And present phantom of imperious Rome[dk] 190 Is peopled with those warriors; and methinks They flit along the eternal City's rampart, And stretch their glorious, gory, shadowy hands, And ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... of St. Michael's church answered the warning peal with two loud rings; and simultaneously the city re-echoed the report of a bloody insurrection. On the long line of wharfs half circling the city, stood men aghast with fright; to the west all was quiet about the battery; to the south, the long rampart of dark moving pines that bordered on that side the calm surface of a harbour of unsurpassed beauty, seemed sleeping in its wonted peacefulness; to the east, as if rising from the sea to mar the beauty of the scene, stood fort Sumpter's sombre ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... elephants took their places amongst those of the Rajah; and when the mob had sufficiently pelted one another with balls and dirty red powder, a torchlight procession was formed, the idols leading the way, to a very large tank, bounded by a high rampart, within which was a ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... cracked bell. Winnie Verloc was a young woman with a full bust, in a tight bodice, and with broad hips. Her hair was very tidy. Steady-eyed like her husband, she preserved an air of unfathomable indifference behind the rampart of the counter. Then the customer of comparatively tender years would get suddenly disconcerted at having to deal with a woman, and with rage in his heart would proffer a request for a bottle of marking ink, retail ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... of affairs at the Fort, when one evening O'Flaherty appeared to pace the little rampart that looked towards Lake Ontario, with an appearance of anxiety and impatience strangely at variance with his daily phlegmatic look. It seemed that the corporal's party he had despatched that morning to forage, near the ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... foot-guards, and one hundred and twenty elephants, whose tusks are said to have been armed with sharp and poisoned daggers. Against these monsters, or rather against the imagination of his troops, he condescended to use some extraordinary precautions of fire and a ditch, of iron spikes and a rampart of bucklers; but the event taught the Mongols to smile at their own fears; and as soon as these unwieldy animals were routed, the inferior species (the men of India) disappeared from the field. Timur made his triumphal ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... a hundred women and children. They had among them sixty firelocks, and as many pikes and swords. Round the agent's house they threw up with great speed a wall of turf fourteen feet in height and twelve in thickness. The space enclosed was about half an acre. Within this rampart all the arms, the ammunition and the provisions of the settlement were collected, and several huts of thin plank were built. When these preparations were completed, the men of Kenmare began to make vigorous reprisals on ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... this corner," whispered Marcos. "It is piled up against the rampart by the north wind. I will drop you over the wall on to it and then follow you. You remember how ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... huge mountain rampart which guards the northern frontier of India thrusts out in the north-west a great bastion whose outer walls are the Hindu Kush and the Muztagh-Karakoram ranges. Behind the latter with a general trend from south-east to north-west are the great valley of the Indus to the point near Gilgit where ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... water roads formed by the river Rhine, there grown sluggish, fatigued by its long travel, but more than one hundred and fifty stone bridges reunite the dissevered streets. The same world-renowned river, degraded from the beautiful, free-flowing Rhine, serves as a moat from the rampart that surrounds Leyden and is crossed by drawbridges at the imposing gateways that give access to the city. Fine broad promenades, shaded by noble trees, border the canals and add to the retired appearance of the houses behind, heightening the effect of scholastic seclusion ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... consternation into the soul of every individual of that brotherhood whose bond was crime, who was already "wanted" for some offence or other, whether it ranged from murder in the first degree to some petty piece of sneak thievery. Stangeist, the Indian chief, the lawyer whose cunning brain had stood as a rampart between the underworld and a prison cell, was himself now in the Tombs with the certainty of the electric chair before him; and with him, the same fate equally assured, were Australian Ike, The Mope, and Clarie Deane! Aristocrats of the Bad ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... From the rampart, where I paused that morning, as I strolled out so carelessly, leaning over the wall and looking over the Umbrian plain, there is a fair prospect—the fairest, I think, that I have ever seen, save one—and I hung there drinking in ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... great temple. Along the face of each terrace, and around the face also of the plateau, a heavy defensive wall rose to a height of twenty feet or more; and from the base of the crowning plateau, thence accessible by a single broad flight of stairs—being led through openings in the rampart walls of the terraces, and down each terrace face by means of stair-ways—twelve streets descended, of which the central six ended at the water-side and the remainder against the great outer wall. It was this outer line of strong defence that gave the city—which otherwise ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... is very necessary that your Majesty order a fortress of stone built in this city, for the one here now would be exceedingly easy to take, as it is nothing more than a palisade, with but little rampart; and, as your Majesty will have been informed, we are surrounded by so ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume VI, 1583-1588 • Emma Helen Blair
... with passion and shame, and my eyes well-nigh blinded with sudden up-springing of tears. How I got to my hollow I do not know, but I ran and ran and ran, with my blood tingling, heedless of all the world, until at last I found myself tumbling down over its ridged wall or rampart of hummocks and dropping, with a choking moan, flat on my face in an agony ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... then?" said the Doctor bitterly. "There will be four bodies lying in front of us between our breasts and the men who come on, and so again and again till we have made a rampart ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... from which they could be attacked; for the precipitous range of the Black Hills, standing behind Minturne Creek with its semicircular rampart, protected their rear and sides, so that they had only their front face to guard, along the course of the stream, following ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... besieging force for operations elsewhere, and the Russians began a serious effort to surmount the Carpathian rampart. They got well to the south of the Dukla, made substantial progress in the centre through the Rostoki pass, and by the middle of April held the crests for a continuous seventy miles; cavalry penetrated much farther down the slopes, and the Austrians ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... there is no such brave show of battlement and rampart. In all our rambles we never came upon a castle or palace; in fact, so far as I remember, no one ever spoke of such structures. They seem to have no place there. Nor is it hard to understand this singular divergence from ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... carried our armies victoriously through the storms of the Revolution and the last war, and now waves triumphantly in every sea, the kindred emblem of our country's glory. It gave us Washington—it gave us liberty, and bears our name aloft among the nations of the earth. It is our only rampart in war—our only safeguard in peace, and under its auspices we declared, achieved, maintained, and can alone preserve our liberties. It is the only basis of our solid and substantial interests, and the last star of hope ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... made, is also obtainable, and hence the actual elevation of the mountain can be calculated. By measurements of this kind the altitudes of other lunar objects, such, for example, as the height of the rampart surrounding a circular-walled plane, can ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... ruins which cover the top and middle part of the stately hill which towers above the town. Having ordered some refreshment at the inn where we dismounted, I ascended till I arrived at a large wall or rampart, which, at a certain altitude embraces the whole hill. I crossed a rude bridge of stones, which bestrides a small hollow or trench; and passing by a large tower, entered through a portal into the enclosed part of the hill. On the left hand stood a church, in good preservation, and still ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... stone-wall, not high, but very thick, extending in the same manner. On the outside of it were the ruins of two houses, one on each side of the entry or gate to it. The wall is built all along of uncemented stones, but of so large a size as to make a very firm and durable rampart. It has been built all about the consecrated ground, except where the precipice is deep enough to form an enclosure of itself. The sacred spot contains more than two acres. There are within it the ruins of many houses, none of them large, ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... proceeded thither with his generals to give thanks for the miraculous success of Serbia's army. Once more the famous little town, the "white town" that is throned so splendidly above the plain where two wide rivers meet, was in possession of the Serbs. Against this rampart many human waves have broken—Attila and his Huns encamped on the plain, the Ostrogoths appeared, Justinian built the city walls, then came the Avars and Charlemagne and the Franks, the Bulgars, the Byzantines, the Magyars. The white ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... be nearer than most men think—the problem of Poland will be one of the greatest difficulty and importance. Austria-Hungary has comparatively little interest in retaining her Poles. The Austrian Poles dwell in Galicia outside the great rampart of the Carpathian Mountains, which form the natural frontier of the Dual Monarchy toward the northeast. The loss of Galicia, with its oilfields and mines, may be regrettable to Austria-Hungary, but it will not affect her very seriously. To Germany, ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... "pink—green sleeves—white cap"—the racing jacket of "Count Donato," as Anna was known to the Jockey Club. He could make out nothing more than a kaleidoscope of color changing swiftly upon a verdant arena, this and an unbroken line of people stretching away to the very confines of the woodlands and a rampart wall of stands and boxes and tents. For him there were no niceties of effort and of counter-effort. The jockeys appeared to be so many little monkeys clinging to the necks of wild chargers who rolled in their distress as ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... doubting your genius, still doubts your power; if he holds the opinion of our poet Coleridge, that our island needs no rampart, no bulwark, other than the raucous murmur of the ocean, ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas
... are yon peaked hills for a rampart lying, As dusty gold is the light in the palms o'erhead, 'What is the name o' the land? and this calm sweet sighing, If it be echo, where first was ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... a rampart, gloomy, terrible, impregnable. He shrugged his shoulders with another grimace, then, as the foam splashed up over his feet, leaped lightly onto another rock higher than the first, whence it was possible to reach a ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... dark, trod upon a sword point, and was wounded in the foot. The daylight brought the enemy again, who now succeeded in making themselves masters of the outer line of defence. Grey, crippled as he was, when he saw his men give way, sprung to the top of the rampart, "wishing God that some shot would take him." A soldier caught him by the scarf and pulled him down, and all that was left of the garrison fell back, carrying their commander with them into the keep. The gate was rammed close, but Guise could now finish his work at his leisure, and had the English ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... marked that mountain high, The lone lake's western boundary, And deemed the stag must turn to bay, Where that huge rampart barred the way; Already glorying in the prize, Measured his antlers with his eyes; For the death-wound and death-halloo Mustered his breath, his whinyard drew:— But thundering as he came prepared, With ready arm and weapon ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... preserve me from the cruel destiny with which I was threatened. The serpent failed not to come at the usual hour, and went round the tree, seeking for an opportunity to devour me, but was prevented by the rampart I had made; so that he lay till day, like a cat watching in vain for a mouse that has fortunately reached a place of safety. When day appeared, he retired, but I dared not to leave my fort until the ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... wrongs. From him Fridleif heard the tidings of his father's death, and granting the aid he sought, went to Norway in armed array. At this time the aforesaid brothers, their allies forsaking them, built a very high rampart within an island surrounded by a swift stream, also extending their earthworks along the level. Trusting to this refuge, they harried the neighborhood with continual raids. For they built a bridge on which they used to get to the mainland when they left the island. This bridge was fastened to the ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... reached the spot with their forces. The Moors had the enemy in front and rear; they placed themselves back to back, with their banner in the centre. In this way they fought with desperate and deadly determination, making a rampart around them with the slain. More Christian troops arrived and hemmed them in, but still they fought, without asking for quarter. As their number decreased they serried their circle still closer, defending their banner ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... promise him his liberty if he would spare their lives. The lieutenant of the third brigade commanded his men to fire; but the guards had before them their terrified companions, who served as a living rampart for Porthos. We have said that the light produced by the spark and the match did not last more than two seconds; but during these two seconds this is what it illumined: in the first place, the giant, enlarged in the ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere |
