"Babel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... came too late. His Highness had only time enough to hurry the birch wood into the box and bang down the cover before flying footsteps filled the house, maids appeared from every door, and there was a blast of wind, a babel of voices, and the discomfited boy found himself face ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... its coldest admirers. He ransacked the myths and legends of various nations, and dwelt upon the stories of giants and demi-gods with scarcely less enthusiasm than if discoursing on the building of Babel or on the gift of the law on Sinai. Herder disliked the theories of Kant with cordial aversion. Of course the Koenigsberg sage had nothing in common with the Weimar rhapsodist. Had Herder only given a prominence to his belief in the fact of inspiration ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... her mother's sitting-room in the midst of what seemed a babel of voices. James Coryston, indeed, who was sitting in a corner of the room while Coryston and Sir Wilfrid Bury argued across him, was not contributing to it. He was watching his mother, and she on the other side of the room was talking rapidly to her son Arthur, who could evidently ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... slave-States." But the disavowal did not relieve him from Southern enmity. The fire-eaters seized the pretext to charge him with all manner of "abolition" intentions, and by violent debate and the utterance of threats of disunion made the House a parliamentary and almost a revolutionary babel for nearly two months. Certain appropriations were exhausted, and the treasury was in great need of funds. Efforts were made to adopt the plurality rule, and to choose a Speaker for a limited period; but every such movement ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... unintelligible, to our fellows. It has not seldom occurred to me (noting how in our national legislature everything runs to talk, as lettuces, if the season or the soil be unpropitious, shoot up lankly to seed, instead of forming handsome heads) that Babel was the first Congress, the earliest mill erected for the manufacture of gabble. In these days, what with Town Meetings, School Committees, Boards (lumber) of one kind and another, Congresses, Parliaments, Diets, ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... lull in the tumult on yonder hill, And the clamour has grown less loud, Though the Babel of tongues is never still, With the presence of such a crowd. The bell has rung. With their riders up At the starting post they muster, The racers stripp'd for the "Melbourne Cup", All gloss and polish and lustre; And the course is seen, with its ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... remaining guide led the way at a brisk pace through the bustling town. In front of the various hotels were noisy groups of tourists about to set forth on pilgrimages, some bound for the neighboring glaciers and cascades, and others preparing for more distant and more hardy enterprises. It was a perfect Babel of voices—French, Scotch, German, Italian, and English; with notes of every sort of patois—above which the strident bass of the mules soared triumphantly at intervals. There are not many busier spots than Chamouni at early morning in the height of ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... they did, for when Mildred had climbed up three stairways in a five-story, narrow house, which even at that hour was filled with a babel of sounds, the old mansion seemed a refuge, and when she had glanced around the narrow room and two dark closets of bedrooms, she shuddered and said, "Papa, can ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... The Tower of Babel and the Confusion of tongues—by Mr. Howes: the contribution of various tradesmen ...
— Ely Cathedral • Anonymous
... Anstice ever had a very clear recollection of the next ten minutes. It was an inferno, a babel, a confusion of shots and yells and angry clamour; but beyond a slight, flesh wound sustained by Hassan neither of the defenders sustained any casualties; and had their ammunition been as plentiful as their courage was high ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... flood and fire. The great generation of the Encyclopaedists had passed away, and the teachings of Rousseau had prevailed over those of Montesquieu and Voltaire. The sober sense of the economists was swept aside by the sound and fury of the demagogues, and France was become a very Babel of tongues. The old malady of words had swept over the world like ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... the first train for London, where we arrived at midnight. Two weeks in that vast Babel,—then, ho! for Paris! Twelve hours by rail and steamer carried us out of John Bull's dominions into the brilliant metropolis of his French neighbor. Joseph accompanied us, and wrote letters home, filled with gossip which I knew, or hoped, would ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... assured, sir, in the Sacred Writings, that 'except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it.' I firmly believe this. And I also believe that, without His concurring aid, we shall succeed in this political building, no better than the building of Babel." ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... hint, and Jessie and myself were soon fast asleep in spite of the din close beside us. It was Saturday night, and the store was full; but the Babel-like sounds disturbed us not, and we neither of us ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... is there no one to comfort her? They have demanded his sacrifice in the name of duty, and she has consented: ought not that to be enough to comfort her? then other people appear from other parts of the garden, and there is a Babel of tongues. He hears nothing; but he follows that sad face, until he could imagine that he listened to the ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... greater surely than round the tower of Babel. German and French and English, Scots accent and Irish brogue, pedantic Hanoverian and lusty Brunswick tones, all and more of these varied sounds mingle with one another, and half-drown by their clamour the sweet ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... Babylonians by allowing them to rebuild the Temple of Bel, which had been destroyed. He also secured the affections of the captive Jews; for he excused them from doing any work on this building as soon as he heard that they considered it the Tower of Babel, and hence objected to aiding in ...
— The Story of the Greeks • H. A. Guerber
... been trained also to talk French daily during dinner, so we were not quite "helpless foreigners" when we steamed away from St. Catherine's Docks, and found ourselves on the following day in Antwerp, amid what seemed to us a very Babel of conflicting tongues. Alas for our carefully spoken French, articulated laboriously! We were lost in that swirl of disputing luggage-porters, and could not understand a word! But Miss Marryat was quite equal to the occasion, being by no means new ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... swarming throng of people. On the right of the island was Saint Peter's church, upon the spot where next Saint Peter's Abbey, and centuries later the great Westminster, would stand. It rose silent in a smother of confusion and a babel of noise of men shouting, and horses neighing, and the songs of boatmen on the Tamesis which bounded the southern end of the island. There was a temple of Apollo close beside it, for old gods and new dwelt side by side. To the ancient faith of their pagan ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... two stanzas, which I send you as a brick of my Babel, and by which you can judge of the texture of ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... people of every nationality known to London, and everybody there present seemed crazy with excitement. How, or by whom, our little party was singled out was beyond my power to guess. But we were recognized in a moment, and in another moment were swept asunder from each other amid such a polyglot babel of voices as I had never heard before. People were laughing and crying and cheering and fighting all at once, and I had a glimpse of the count in the arms of a score of mustachioed, sallow-featured men who were weeping ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray
... red sandstone, strong and broad enough to have supported a Tower of Babel, formed the portals of the outer gate of the palace. A pair of Terror-birds, whose plumage was a pearly grey, stood sleepily on guard. Our soldier, who could scarcely have reached to the backs of the birds, lifted up his cross-bow ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... driven to the huge palace of Necessidades, which is but a wing of a building that no King of Portugal ought ever to be rich enough to complete, and which, if perfect, might outvie the Tower of Babel. The mines of Brazil must have been productive of gold and silver indeed when the founder imagined this enormous edifice. From the elevation on which it stands it commands the noblest views,—the city ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... did he stand. How long the baiting lasted no one knew; it may have been an hour, then Joseph's passive silence roused the anger of the overlord, who became demoniac in his rage. His followers joined in harrying the victim, until the place became a babel. Finally Elzemah stepped forward, torch in hand, and spat upon the ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... been detained down-town all day in the whirl of our New York Babel, and had not yet been home. He would hand it ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... giants, which is here mentioned, is not to be confounded with that between Jupiter and the Titans, who were inhabitants of heaven. The fall of the angels, as conveyed by tradition, probably gave rise to the story of the Titans; while, perhaps, the building of the tower of Babel may have laid the foundation of that of the attempt by the giants to reach heaven. Perhaps, too, the descendants of Cain, who are probably the persons mentioned in Scripture as the children 'of men' ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... most of them about to perish, went up a babel of sounds which in its sum shaped itself to one prolonged scream, such as might proceed from a Titan in his agony. All this beneath a brooding, moonlit sky, and on a sea as smooth as glass. Upon the ship, which now lay upon her side, ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... and appetite failed; his spirits sunk into a uniform gloom. In April 1796 he wrote—"I fear it will be some time before I tune my lyre again. By Babel's streams I have sat and wept. I have only known existence by the pressure of sickness and counted time by the repercussions of pain. I close my eyes in misery and open them without hope. I look on the vernal day ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... to the under-sheriff in New Town, a saddler by profession, who immediately waited on him to the prison; he found it well peopled, and his ears were confused with almost as many dialects as put a stop to the building of Babel. Mr. Carew saluted them, and courteously inquired what countrymen they were: some were from Kilkenny, some Limeric, some Dublin, others of Somerset, Dorset, Devon, and Cornwall; so that he found he had choice enough of companions, and, ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... Sandell and I went along to see what was happening there. We found about two hundred and fifty cows in the nearer one, and, as closely as we could count, about five hundred in the adjacent colony. The babel of sounds made one feel thankful that these noisy creatures were some distance from the Shack. Nearly all the cows had pups, some of which had reached a fair size, while others were only a few hours old. We saw several dead ones, crushed out almost flat, and some skuas were busily engaged gorging ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... An ambition to emulate Wagner, "The Tower of Babel," The composer's theories and strivings, et seq.—Dean Stanley, "Die Makkabaer," "Sulamith," "Christus," "Das verlorene Paradies," "Moses," Action and stage directions, New Testament stories in opera, The Prodigal ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... the first angel is followed by a second, proclaiming, "Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city, because she made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication."(623) The term "Babylon" is derived from "Babel," and signifies confusion. It is employed in Scripture to designate the various forms of false or apostate religion. In Revelation 17, Babylon is represented as a woman,—a figure which is used in the Bible as the symbol of a church, a virtuous woman representing ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... classes, and it might be said all nationalities; for in the din that arose from the crowd Derrick caught scraps of Italian, Spanish, and French, the thick, soft tone of the Mexican, the brogue of the Irishman; it was a veritable Babel. As he passed behind the opening through which the performers entered, Isabel Devigne stepped out from the women's dressing-room, and Derrick could not suppress a ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... ringing of bells, whistle of engines, and all the varied notes of that Babel diapason that so utterly bewilders the stranger stranded on the bustling streets of busy Gotham, fell upon Regina's ears with the startling force of novelty. She wondered if there were thunder mixed with swiftly ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... Babel, empresse of the East, Upreard her buildinges to the threatned skie: And second Babell, tyrant of the West, Her ayry towers upraised much more high. But with the weight of their own surquedry** They both are fallen, that all the ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... must not be forgotten. The canopy of smoke overhanging the vast Modern Babel, and oftentimes obscuring even the light of the sun itself, did not dim the beauties of the Ancient City,—sea coal being but little used in comparison with wood, of which there was then abundance, as at this time in the capital of France. Thus the atmosphere was clearer and lighter, ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... the cause and the matiere Why god the grete flodes sende, Of al the world and made an ende Bot Noe5 with his felaschipe, Which only weren saulf be Schipe. And over that thurgh Senne it com That Nembrot such emprise nom, Whan he the Tour Babel on heihte Let make, as he that wolde feihte 1020 Ayein the hihe goddes myht, Wherof divided anon ryht Was the langage in such entente, Ther wiste non what other mente, So that thei myhten noght procede. And thus it stant of every dede, Wher Senne takth the cause on honde, It may upriht noght ...
— Confessio Amantis - Tales of the Seven Deadly Sins, 1330-1408 A.D. • John Gower
... pretty hard work at that. Like all edifices reared without a foundation, it will fall with a crash some day, and the fragments will be of very little use to you." And there the conversation ended: they had reached the plaza, and a babel of voices surrounded them. Governor Alvarado stood on the upper corridor of his house, throwing handfuls of small gold coins among the people, who were shrieking with delight. The girl guests mingled with them, seeing that ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... seems to be a confused past. Here I especially applaud the brave Sulpiz Boisseree, who is indefatigably employed in a magnificent series of copper-plates to exhibit the cathedral of Cologne as the model of those vast conceptions, the spirit of which, like that of Babel, strove up to heaven, and which were so out of proportion to earthly means that they were necessarily stopped fast in their execution. If we have been hitherto astonished that such buildings proceeded only so ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... doorway and stood looking for the list of names such as are set at the foot of the stairs leading to flats in London. There was no such list. From a lighted doorway on the right came a babel of shrill, high-pitched voices. Betty looked in at the door ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
... blast at Roncesvalles. This came from the plain of the giants between Malebolge and the mouth of the infernal pit. All around the pit, or well, were set the giants with half their bodies fixed in earth. Nimrod, as a punishment for building the tower of Babel, could speak no language, but babbled some gibberish. Ephialtes, Briareus, and Antaeus were here, all horrible in aspect; Antaeus, less savage than the others, lifted the two poets, and stooping set them down in the pit below. This was the last and ninth circle, a dismal pit for the punishment ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... nosed his horse into the group of cayuses that stood with reins hanging, "tied to the ground," in front of the Long Horn Saloon. Beyond the open doors sounded a babel of voices and he could see the men lined two ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... by no one in authority, elected by no committee. He has occurred, emerged from the mass of men; by virtue of some energy within him has made good his position in front of the instrument. He flogs the keys, and above the babel of talk sounds some rag-time melody, once popular, now forgotten or despised at home. Here or there a voice takes up the tune and sings ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... funerals, christenings, weddings, and street fights, would seem from some contemporary accounts to be invariably mixed up together in helpless and apparently inextricable confusion. The general bewilderment was made more bewildering by the very babel of street cries bawled from the sturdy lungs of orange-girls, chair-menders, broom-sellers, ballad-singers, old-clothes men, and wretched representatives of the various jails, raising their plaintive appeal to "remember the poor prisoners." The thoroughfares, however, would have been in still worse ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... elect selves were rigidly excluded. The juniors took possession of the play-room, and relieved their spirits by games which made the maximum of noise. Several of the intermediates peeped in, but, finding the place a mixture of a bear-garden and the Tower of Babel, they retired to the sanctuary of their own form-room, where they sat making half-hearted efforts to read or paint, and grousing ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... by that vaporous outline so faint that it almost melts into the colour of the sky, and that, if one had not been forewarned, it might escape notice. Neither years nor barbarians have been able to overthrow these artificial mountains, the most gigantic monuments, except, perhaps, the Tower of Babel, ever raised by man. For five thousand years they have been standing there,—almost as old as the world, according to the biblical account. Even our own civilisation, with its powerful methods of ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... here and there like the ghosts of buried hope. Down by the river stands the furnace, grim and silent as the extinct crater of Popocatepetl; and the great hotel on the hill looks like the tower of Babel two thousand years after the confusion of tongues. The last of the speculators, with his blue nose and his old battered plug hat which resembles an accordion that has been yanked by a cyclone, stands on the corner and contemplates his ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... fane of the gods of science—the caravansery of the world. That Exhibition brought together the ends of the earth,—long- estranged human brethren sat down together in pleasant communion. It was a modern Babel, finished and furnished, and where there was almost a fusion, instead of, a confusion, of tongues. The "barbarous Turk" was there, the warlike Russ, the mercenary Swiss, the passionate Italian, the voluptuous Spaniard, the gallant Frenchman,—and yet foreboding English citizens ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... undefiled garments are stained with the meritricious bravery of Babylonish ornaments, and with the symbolising badges of conformity with Rome, her harmless hands reach brick and mortar to the building of Babel, her beautiful feet with shoes are all besmeared, whilst they return apace in the way of Egypt, and wade the ingruent brooks of Popery. Oh! transformed virgin, whether is thy beauty gone from thee? Oh! forlorn prince's daughter, how art thou not ashamed to look thy Lord in the ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... such a lively clatter of dishes downstairs and babel of voices that he did not hear a sleigh drive ...
— Big Brother • Annie Fellows-Johnston
... the false, the semi-false, and the true were alike true in this that they were there, and had power in their hands more or less. It was well to feel so; and yet not well! We find it written, "Wo to them that are at ease in Zion"; but surely it is a double wo to them that are at ease in Babel, in Domdaniel. On the other hand he wrote many volumes, amusing many thousands of men. Shall we call this great? It seems to us there dwells and struggles another sort of spirit in the inward parts of ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... retreat, lifted her small voice till every hollow resounded with her content. Silvery butterflies wavered across the sun's pale beams, sipped, and flew in wreaths away. The infinite hordes of the dust raised their universal voice till, listening, it seemed to me their tiny Babel was after all my own old, far-off ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... ourselves as well as our luggage, by numbers of naked skeleton-like Hindus, Parsees, Moguls, and various other tribes. All this crowd emerged, as if from the bottom of the sea, and began to shout, to chatter, and to yell, as only the tribes of Asia can. To get rid of this Babel confusion of tongues as soon as possible, we took refuge in the first bunder boat ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... there rang forth the sharp tattoo of a horse's hoofs on the paved courtyard without, followed by the sharp challenge of a sentry, the bang of a matchlock, and then a very babel ...
— Tales of Destiny • Edmund Mitchell
... where the table and settle-seats had been carried away by the run, and the outcry of the sailors yelling and stamping above, not to speak of the grinding and groaning of the bulkheads and shuddering of the ship's timbers between decks, all making up a babel of sound and confusion that was worse by a thousand fold than what had previously occurred during the first storm which the vessel, experienced in the Bay ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... was there heard at Hall Place—not even when the fox was killed in the conservatory, among acres of broken glass, and tons of smashed flowerpots—such a noise, row, hubbub, babel, shindy, hullabaloo, and total contempt of dignity, repose, and order, as that day, when Grimes, the gardener, the groom, the dairymaid, Sir John, the steward, the ploughman, and the Irishwoman, all ran up the park, shouting "Stop thief," in the belief that Tom had ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... him, Calvert perceived that they had stopped before a building whose massive exterior was most imposing. Alighting and throwing the reins to the groom, Beaufort led Calvert under the arcades of the Palais Royal and into the grand courtyard, where were such crowds and such babel of noises as greatly astonished the young American. Shops lined the sides of the vast building—shops of every variety, filled with every kind of luxury known to that luxurious age; cafes whose reputation ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... white and yellow and brown, men of every race and skin, they came and went, their brief hours loud with babel of strange tongues and a scuffling of countless feet like the sound of surf; and their goings left the street strangely hushed, a way of sinister reticences, its winding length ill-lighted by infrequent corner-lamps, its mephitic glooms enlivened ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... had remained, silent and dull, in a constrained position during the whole of the day, felt a load taken off their spirits as soon as they set foot on dry land; and in a trice the silence that had hitherto reigned was broken by a very Babel of tongues, among which could be distinguished the guttural jargon of the Scindian, the bastard dialect of Mahratti, of the Hindoo from the Deccan, and the ungrammatical patois of Hindostani, which—although, when exclusively used, it marked out the Mussulman—was ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... there is no dispute, is the Hilel codex written at the end of the sixth century. Its name is said to be derived from the fact that it was written at Hila, a town built near the ruins of the ancient Babel; some maintain, however, that it was named after ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho
... on them to keep them down; and whenever there was an earthquake, it was thought to be caused by one of these giants struggling to get free, though perhaps there was some remembrance of the tower of Babel in the story. Pallas, this glorious daughter of Jupiter, was wise, brave, and strong, and she was also the goddess of women's works—of all spinning, ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge
... village, nestling at the foot of a range of undulating hills that rose, plateau after plateau, until their summits seemed to meet the sky. The wharf was crowded as usual at that slack evening hour. And in the babel of voices, banging of boxes, shifting of stuff, and general confusion, our little travellers, rested and refreshed by their long sleep and the remainder of the provisions which they had consumed in the cabin, had no difficulty in stealing off the boat and away from the wharf ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... he knew what she was about, Rosamond was on the pavement and had rushed into the house; and while he was signing to a man to take the horse's head, she was out again, the gaslight catching her eyes so that they glared like a tigress's, her child in her arms, and a whole Babel of explaining tongues behind her. How she did it neither she nor Raymond ever knew, but in a second she had flown to her perch, saying hoarsely, "Drive me to Dr. Worth's. They were drugging her. I don't know whether I was in time. No, not a word"—(this to ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... federal capital, Frankfurt, to unify Germany "by speechifying and majorities," saw power slip back little by little into the hands of the monarchs and princes. In the Austrian Empire nationalist claims and strivings led to a very Babel of discordant talk and action, amidst which the young Hapsburg ruler, Francis Joseph, thanks to Russian military aid, was able to triumph over the valour of the Hungarians and the devotion of ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... interruption. On the contrary, he bawled it out in the voice of a bo's'n's mate, while the four daughters and five sons, including the baby and the infant, crawled up his legs and clung to his pockets, and enacted Babel ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... up in the familiar scenes of his years of wanderings. For he was at home again. Alixe Delavigne, however carefully watched for her eastern adventure, was socially helpless in a land of strange alien races, of discordant Babel tongues, of shifting scenes, a land as unreal as the visions of ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... you fancy anything so unlikely?" I asked aside at last, behind the babel of voices. ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... his Chaldean Account of Genesis in 1876, he was of opinion that the Creation Tablets in the British Museum contained descriptions of the Temptation of Eve by the serpent and of the building and overthrow of the Tower of Babel. The description of Paradise in Genesis ii seems to show traces of Babylonian influence, and the cylinder seal, Brit. Mus. No. 89,326, was thought to be proof that a Babylonian legend of the Temptation existed. In fact, George Smith printed a copy of the seal in his ...
— The Babylonian Legends of the Creation • British Museum
... in a fillet round their heads. Their black faces were alive with merriment and wonder—everything was new and extraordinary to them. The sea, the ships, the mighty city, the gathered crowd, all excited their astonishment, and their white teeth glistened as they chatted incessantly with a very babel of laughter ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty
... lying In the buried past of the earth, Built Nineveh with our sighing, And Babel itself with our mirth; And o'erthrew them with prophesying To the old of the new world's worth; For each age is a dream that is dying, Or one that ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... bruises can testify," Bardolph assented. "Had each one of them a tongue, they would raise a clamor beside which Babel were as an heir weeping for his rich uncle's death; their testimony would qualify you for any mad-house in England. And if their evidence go against the doctor's stomach, the watchman at the corner hath three teeth—or, rather, hath them no longer, since you ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... of a furious orgie; the Babel of cries, of fragments of songs, of insane, meaningless laughter, is dying away, through the pure exhaustion of the revelers; on the gay carpet and the rich damask are pools of spilled liquors, heaps of shivered glass, and bouquets and garlands that have ceased to be fragrant hours ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... Chinese, Japanese, various races of Malays and East Indians, jostle elbows with Englishmen, Americans and every other race under the sun except perhaps, the American Indian. It is surely a motley throng and the tower of Babel was nowhere compared to this ...
— Wanderings in the Orient • Albert M. Reese
... the attention of each voyager. Every barge had a new-comer alongside and near enough to talk across the water. Therefore a great babel and confusion arose in which rational conversation became impossible. Then vessels essayed to approach nearer one another and the formation began to break. The right oars of one boat and the left of another would be withdrawn and the vessels lashed together. Then they were permitted to drift, with ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... of what the human intellect, when all its powers are concentrated upon a single object, is capable of achieving. It seemed to me, as I looked at the performance, that if all the races of men, who had been stricken asunder at the foot of the Tower of Babel by the miracle which made the tongues of each to speak a language unknown to the others, could be brought together again at the foot of the same tower, with all the advantages which thousands of years of education had in the meantime ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... early nightfall, when the colored candles are ablaze over the entire tree, and the great red ball of light shines from its topmost branches, the children are admitted to the room amidst a babel of shouts and screams of delight, which are increased upon the arrival of a veritable Santa Claus bestrewn with wool-snow and laden with baskets of gifts. On the huge sled are one or more baskets according ...
— Yule-Tide in Many Lands • Mary P. Pringle and Clara A. Urann
... we seek: Can all the varied phrases tell, That Babel's wandering children speak, How thrushes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... undergone. Alternately suffering to the verge of ruin, and enjoying like an epicurean deity: I have been steeped in poverty to the lips; I have been surcharged with wealth. I have sacrificed, and fearfully, to the love of power; I have been disgusted with its possession. I figured in the great Babel until I loved even its confusion of tongues; I grew weary of it, until I hated ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... Patricia, glowing. "My word, but that Miss Green is severe! I never heard such silence as in that room. Why, an ordinary schoolroom is a perfect Babel compared ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... the clatter of dishes and pans and a babel of women's voices, the shrill commands of old Mrs. Bolum rising above them. The feast was preparing. Its hour was at hand. Apollo never was a match for Bacchus, and Perry Thomas could not command attention once Mrs. Bolum appeared ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... Babel, now called Birs Nimroud, built at Babylon by Belus, was used as an observatory and as a temple of the Sun. It was composed of 8 square towers, one over the other, in all 670 feet high, and the same dimensions on ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... you will step across this threshold, now, as the moon rises in the keen Christmas air, and will find a place by the ruddy ingle within-doors, you may hear, if you will, a Babel of voices from many lands, telling over the adventures of the road and falling into the good-fellowship of ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... not spend his life, as they do, in building a new Tower of Babel; in attempting to change that which is fixed by an inflexible law of God's enactment: but let him, yielding to the Superior Wisdom of Providence, content to believe that the march of events is rightly ordered ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... certain incidents of these tales have their counterparts in Irish, in Scandinavian, in Oriental romance. He says, fairly enough, that the assertions of Taliesin, in the famous Hanes Taliesin, or History of Taliesin, that he was present with Noah in the Ark, at the Tower of Babel, and with Alexander of Macedon, 'we may ascribe to the poetic fancy of the Christian priest of the thirteenth century, who brought this romance into its present form. We may compare these statements of the universal presence of the wonder-working magician ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... up for themselves in various departments of literature. Not only their talents, but also their nations and dialects, were so various, that our conversation resembled the confusion of tongues at Babel. We had the Irish brogue, the Scotch accent, and foreign idiom, twanged off by the most discordant vociferation; for as they all spoke together, no man had any chance to be heard, unless he could bawl louder than his fellows. ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... most part the fathers and mothers of the young ladies. We sat down thirty-six to dinner; and I think that we showed a great divergence from those usual colonial banquets, at which the elders are only invited to meet distinguished guests. The officers were chiefly young men; and a greater babel of voices was, I'll undertake to say, never heard from a banqueting-hall than came from our dinner-table. Eva Crasweller was the queen of the evening, and was as joyous, as beautiful, and as high-spirited as a queen should ever be. I did once or twice during the ...
— The Fixed Period • Anthony Trollope
... times when, in the midst of that shrill Babel, the schoolroom, Diana Paget heard the summer winds sighing in the pine-woods above Foretdechene, and fancied herself standing once more in that classic temple on whose plastered wall Valentine had once cut her initials with his penknife in a fantastical monogram, surmounted by a ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... of the councils of primitive man, and of the great national assemblies and international conventions of latter-day man. But we Folk of the Younger World lacked speech, and whenever we were so drawn together we precipitated babel, out of which arose a unanimity of rhythm that contained within itself the essentials of art yet to come. It was ...
— Before Adam • Jack London
... utterances of "Tomato Jimmy," the boys at the back grew so boisterous that at one time it appeared inevitable that the meeting must break up in disorder. The chairman, the candidates, the ladies, the whole house rose, and one man towards the front made himself heard amid the babel to the effect that the ladies ought to walk out to show their resentment of the insults that had been offered their ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... matter," I replied, making him hear with difficulty, for I was unused to speak in such a babel, "since ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... one in their sacrificial certainty, they had arrived at a cross-roads where there was no policeman to take charge. They had broken up into little groups, gathered about their own vociferous stump-orators. The result was babel. Of orators there were a plenty. They abused one another across the Irish Sea. They tried to shout one another down across the Atlantic Ocean. But the hammer-head men of righteousness were gone. After the apocalyptic splendor of mailed knights of Christ charging stern-faced down ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... real-estate men, physicians, dentists, lawyers—in most cases people who had blossomed out into nabobs in the course of the last few years. The crowd was ablaze with diamonds, painted cheeks, and bright-colored silks. It was a babel of blatant self-consciousness, a miniature of the parvenu smugness that had spread like wild-fire over the country after a period of need and ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... Paradise. Not a Paradise then, or now; but to be made so, at God's good pleasure, and in the fullness and mellowness of time. The seed is sown, and the harvest must come; and our children's children, on the world's jubilee morning, shall all go with their sickles to the reaping. Then shall the curse of Babel be revoked, a new Pentecost come, and the language they shall speak shall be the language of Britain. Frenchmen, and Danes, and Scots; and the dwellers on the shores of the Mediterranean, and in the regions round about; ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... summit of his cruelty—blind cruelty it may have been—but it dragged her also to the climax of her mood. Like the falling of the Tower of Babel, with its crumbling of dust and its confusion of tongues, she tumbled headlong from her ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... babel of exclamation arose. The tension of that all but fatal instant snapped, and ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... mile, league after league; the consequence of which would be, that I should be expected to run up and down this ladder, like any fatigue party of Irish hodmen, carrying hods of mortar and bricks to the top of any Babel which my wretched admirer might choose to build. But I put a stop to this villainy. I nipped the abominable system of extortion in the very bud, by refusing to take the first step. The man could have no pretense, you know, for expecting me to climb the third or fourth round, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... might find expression in the descort (discord), in which each stanza showed a change of metre and melody. The descort of Raimbaut de Vaqueiras is written in five dialects, one for each stanza, and the last and sixth stanza of the poem gives two lines to each dialect, which Babel of strange sounds is intended, he says, to show how entirely his lady's heart has changed towards him. The ballata and the estampida were dance-songs, but very few examples survive. Certain love letters also remain ...
— The Troubadours • H.J. Chaytor
... repentance hath made him mad! But through all that Mr. Desires-awake was as one that heard them not. For Mr. Desires-awake was full of louder voices within. The voices within his bosom quite drowned the babel around him. The voices within called him far worse names than the streets of the city ever called him; till all he could do was to draw his rope down upon his head and press on again to the Prince's pavilion. You understand about that ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... researches. Now he wished to go further south, beyond Nimroud to Kalah Shergat, the yet earlier capital of Assyria; and yet further to Babylon, that he might see and test the multitude of mounds of ancient Chaldea, the real land of Nimrod, the seat of Eden, and the Tower of Babel, far more ancient than any one of the three capitals of Assyria. While he did scarce more than to visit and report on the Babylonian mounds, his diggings in Nineveh itself were of vast importance, for there he found the library of Asshurbanabal, on clay tablets, which ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... produce. It is the vegetable market, always a favorite morning resort in every new locality. How animated are the eager sellers and buyers! What a study is afforded by their bright, expressive faces; how gay the varied colors of dress and of vegetables; how ringing the Babel of tongues and the braying ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... Neapolitans, who certainly do not possess such smoothness of tongue as would classify them among their brethren in the old proverb: 'When the confusion of tongues happened at the building of the Tower of Babel, if the Italian had been there, Nimrod would ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... picture was doubtless a highly exaggerated one. The discretionary powers which some of the schemes of comprehension proposed to give would not have left the Church of England a mere scene of confusion, an unseemly Babel of anarchy and licence. A sketch might be artfully drawn, in which nothing should be introduced but what was truthfully selected from the practices of different London Churches of the present day, which might easily make a foreigner imagine that in the National Church ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... awoke the audience as it were, and instantly there arose a babel of sounds that rent the very skies. "His daughter! He says that she is his daughter! Nam owns ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... (the result of generations of fighting). Instead of saying "Good-morning," they say "Victory"; and the answer is, "May the victory be yours." The language is Georgian, of course; and then there is Tartar, and Polish, and Russian, and I can't help thinking that the Tower of Babel was the poorest joke that was ever played on mankind. Nothing stops ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... infancy the soul is more or less confused. It hears many sounds and does not always know how to distinguish between siren voices and those which prophesy its destiny. It also has to learn to distinguish truth and right. The task of making moral discriminations is not easy at any time. Amid a babel of noises to detect the one clear call which alone can satisfy is almost impossible. The mistakes, therefore, are many, but even by mistakes the soul learns to distinguish the true from the false. But how is it to ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... Holland, besides the wine which they had with them—it is too horrible. As to Margaret and Jan, it is not to be told what miserable people Margaret and Jan were, and especially their excessive covetousness. In fine, it was a Babel. I have never in my life heard of such a disorderly ship. It was confusion without end. I have never been in a ship where there was so much vermin, which were communicated to us, and especially not a few to me, ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts
... carting here, come from nobody guesses where! They fill me with small deer, these negroes, Bedouin Arabs, swashbucklers, adventurers from every land, and ragged settlers who poison me with their pipes, and all jabbering a language that the Tower of Babel itself could make nothing of! And, furthermore, you should see how they treat me—I mean, how they never treat me: never a brush or a wash. They begrudge me grease for my axles. Instead of my good fat quiet horses of other days, little Arab ponies, with the devil in their frames, who fight ...
— Tartarin of Tarascon • Alphonse Daudet
... surrounded him, speaking all together, waving their arms, their faces white under the moon, their eyes large and frightened like the eyes of little children. He tried to push their babel off from him. He could not understand.... Was this a continuation of the nightmare of the afternoon? There was a roar just behind their ears as it seemed. They saw a light flash upon the sky and fade, ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... chivalry recited, the curious old lays of Bretagne were translated and presented to him by the antiquarian dame, Marie. Italian, Provencal, Gascon, Latin, French, and English, were spoken at the court, which the English barons termed a Babel, and minstrels of all descriptions stood in high favor. There was Richard, the King's harper, who had forty shillings a year and a tun of wine; there was Henry of Avranches, the "archipoeta," who wrote a song on the rusticity of the Cornishmen, to which a valiant ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... seven-league boots of the fable, which fitted every body who drew them on, and strides over the universe. How soon, as on the decay of the Roman empire, may all the piles of learning which human endeavours would rear as a tower of Babel to scale the heavens, disappear, leaving but fragments to future generations, as proofs of pre-existent knowledge! Whether we refer to nature or to art, to knowledge or to power, to accumulation or ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Massachusetts to be a Babel of isms, so many square miles of Bedlam, from Boston Corner to Provincetown. Is this intended as a depreciation of our free institutions, by showing the results to which they inevitably lead? Has a Rarey for vicious hobbies ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... The town's third part was this, or little less, Fore which the duke his glorious ensigns spread, For so great compass had that forteress, That round it could not be environed With narrow siege — nor Babel's king I guess That whilom took it, such an army led — But all the ways he kept, by which his foe Might to or from ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... time below us to the left wound the line of Frenchmen. It was so dark that we could not have told that they were there, but for the low babel of sounds that arose of voices and trampling feet, while now and then a sound more painful to us still came up in the form of a groan or a faint cry of pain, and after one of these ...
— Devon Boys - A Tale of the North Shore • George Manville Fenn
... pleasure-seeking ends in disappointment, how the smiles of a deceitful woman may lead to the chamber of death, how little the treasures of wickedness profit, how sins will find out the transgressor, how the heart may be sad in the midst of laughter, how wine is a mocker, how ambition is Babel-building, how he who pursueth evil pursueth it to his death; we can understand how abundance will produce satiety, and satiety lead to disgust,—how disappointment attends our most cherished plans, and how all mortal pursuits fail to ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume II • John Lord
... sign was dark and there was a little coagulation of bareheaded women on the steps. They parted to give her passage, their babel immediately resuming ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... amidst a noise caused by the rumbling of the vehicle, the creaking, jingling, rattling, and clanking, of the atalage, the unceasing crack of the whip, and the chattering of your companions, to which the sounds at Babel were music. The movement then becomes adagio, and soon afterwards the conducteur's voice is heard, begging the passengers in all parts of the vehicle to descend. Wondering what is the matter, you get out with the rest, and find the cause of this commotion to be a grande ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... marched up and halted at the pit edge. My outfit were whites—Russians, French, Germans. But the others were black, brown, yellow—all the motley aggregation of races that formed the Red cohorts, the backbone of the Great Uprising. As the "At ease" order snapped out a babel of tongues rose on the air. Every language of Earth was there save English. The Anglo-Saxons had chosen tortured death rather than submission to the commands of ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... Babylon which is still occupied is (as we have heard from persons of character from beyond sea) styled BALDACH, whilst the part that lies, according to the prophecy, deserted and pathless extends some ten miles to the Tower of Babel The inhabited portion called Baldach is very large and populous; and though it should belong to the Persian monarchy it has been conceded by the Kings of the Persians to their High Priest, whom they call the Caliph; in order that in this also a certain analogy [quaedam habitudo] such as has ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... The old woman's voice, shrill and cracked, but steady and unafraid, cut through the babel of shrieks and cries, "You fools, there ain't no fire! If you'll stop yellin' an' pushin' and go quiet you'll all get out in a minute. It's jest a step to ...
— The Torch Bearer - A Camp Fire Girls' Story • I. T. Thurston
... who have left their all behind them and fled in terror, frequently on foot, for many miles, and carrying their possessions on their backs. The majority are old men, women, and children. In the babel of voices are frequently heard pitiful cries of poorly fed children, shrieks of more lusty ones, and groans and wailings of mothers who still seem stunned and stupefied by ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... was thronged with a surging crowd—patricians and plebeians,—elbowing and pushing one another in mad efforts to get closer to the Rostra and to a small group of magistrates, who, with grave faces, were clustered at the foot of its steps. These latter spoke to each other in whispers, but such a babel of sounds swelled up around them that they might safely have screamed ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... me tell you about my seven select spirits. They are having nursery tea at the present moment with a minimum of comfort and a maximum of noise, so if you can bear a deafening babel of voices and an unmusical clitter-clatter of crockery I will take you inside the room and ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... dream she reached Dover, and got out at the station amid all the confusion attending the arrival of the tidal train, and the babel of voices from cabmen, porters, hotel runners, and such, shouting their ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... means what he says. Yet, what is altogether lighter than vanity? The human heart, answers the religionist. What is altogether deceitful upon the scales? The human heart. What is a Vanity Fair, a mob, a hubbub and babel of noises, to be avoided, shunned, hated? The world. And, lastly, what are our thoughts and struggles, vain ideas, and wishes? Vain, empty illusions, shadows, and lies. And yet this man, with the inspiration ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... name any other); I do not remember a man amongst them whom I ever wished to see twice, except, perhaps, Mezzophanti, who is a Monster of Languages, the Briareus of parts of speech, a walking Polyglott, and more—who ought to have existed at the time of the Tower of Babel as universal Interpreter. He is, indeed, a Marvel, —unassuming also. I tried him in all the tongues of which I have a single oath (or adjuration to the Gods against Postboys, Savages, Tartars, boatmen, sailors, pilots, Gondoliers, Muleteers, Cameldrivers, Vetturini, Postmasters, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... society,—in a word, species of formations. Each wave of time contributes its alluvium, each race deposits its layer on the monument, each individual brings his stone. Thus do the beavers, thus do the bees, thus do men. The great symbol of architecture, Babel, is ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... than this—it is the whole world's map, which you may here discern in its perfectest motion, jostling and turning. It is a heap of stones and men, with a vast confusion of languages; and were the steeple not sanctified, nothing could be liker Babel. The noise in it is like that of bees, a strange humming, or buzzing, mixed of walking, tongues, and feet: it is a kind of still roar, or loud whisper. It is the great exchange of all discourse, and no business whatsoever, but is ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... and south all trails now led to the post. By the end of the third day after the arrival of the company's supplies, a babel of fighting, yelling, ceaselessly moving discord had driven forth the peace and quiet in which Cummins' wife had died. The fighting and discord were among the dogs, and the yelling was a necessary human accompaniment. Half a hundred packs, almost as wild and as savage as the wolves ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... the beginning of the worship of the One True God, defined philosophically as the "Monistic" God-idea, from the building of the tower of Babel, and we may here note in passing that in the earliest references to this tower, there is no allusion to anything suggestive of "confusion of tongues." The name unquestionably came from "babil" meaning "the gate of ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... keenly round the riotous board—I noted the flushed faces and rapid gesticulations of my guests, and listened to the Babel of conflicting tongues. I drew a long breath as I looked—I calculated that in two or three minutes at the very least I might throw down the trump card I had held so patiently in ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... like humans except that their skins were a light green instead of the normal white and pink. They were dressed in dark short tunics, and kept talking to each other in a tongue quite unintelligible to Norman and Hackett. They came closer, flocking curiously around the two men, with a babel of voices quite meaningless to the two. Then one of the men uttered an exclamation, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... were pouring forth a perpetual fire of badinage and BONS MOTS. The tennis-court, in a word, presented as different an aspect as possible from that which it had worn in the morning. The sharp crack of the ball, as it bounded from side to side, was almost lost in the crisp laughter and babel of voices; which as I entered rose into a perfect uproar, Mademoiselle having just flung a whole lapful of roses across the court in return for some witticism. These falling short of the gallery had lighted on the head of the astonished ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... the red-shirted firemen with their helmets and their waterproof garments came rushing into the grounds. A babel of confusion followed, as they demanded to know where they could get connection with the nearest fire hydrant on the street, or if none were handy where ...
— Jack Winters' Gridiron Chums • Mark Overton
... making it, as men reckoned then, a place of strength and much import; and the monks, glancing their eyes downward from the Abbey garden on the hill, saw beneath their feet its narrow streets, gay with the ever passing of rich merchandise, saw its many wharves and water-ways, ever noisy with the babel of strange tongues, saw its many painted masts, wagging their grave heads above the dormer roofs and ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... us from perceiving that the complete practical details of our applied knowledge is all holy and radiant with God's smile. And so, half-way up, on the hillside, beneath a cloudy sky, we build up little earthy hill-cairns of our own petty synthesis, and fancy them Babel-towers whose ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... sorting out in my head the relative merits of mountains, deserts, gorges, et cetera, when I an seized with inspiration at the same time as half the group; we say the same thing in different words and for a time there is Babel, then the idea emerges: ...
— The Lost Kafoozalum • Pauline Ashwell
... when the Calais-Douvres, slipping between the waves, ran close in to the granite pier. She accomplished the feat safely, and was quickly made fast. The gangway was thrown across, and there was a mad rush of passengers hurrying to get ashore. A babel of shouting voices broke loose: "London train ready!" "Here you are, sir!" ...
— In Friendship's Guise • Wm. Murray Graydon
... that the great political convulsion of the last few days had reduced transactions to an unprecedented minimum. In one huge place were long avenues of roulette tables, each with an excited, undignified crowd about it; in another a yelping Babel of white-faced women and red-necked leathery-lunged men bought and sold the shares of an absolutely fictitious business undertaking which, every five minutes, paid a dividend of ten per cent and cancelled a certain ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... little angered me; for hitherto I am provoked no further than to smile at them. And indeed, to look upon the whole faction in a lump, never was a more pleasant sight than to behold these builders of a new Babel, how ridiculously they are mixed, and what a rare confusion there is amongst them. One part of them is carrying stone and mortar for the building of a meeting-house; another sort understand not that language; they are for snatching away their work-fellows' materials ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... Now, to put it mildly, this is not true. We are also told that "the sulphurous graves of Sodom and Gomorrah have been identified." To put it mildly again, this is not true. We are told next that "the remains of the Tower of Babel have been found." This is not true. Assyrian documents are also said to "echo and re-echo the truth of Bible history," This is not true, according to Professor Sayce, who knows more about Assyrian history than Talmage knows ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... Russian empire alone there are more than a hundred spoken languages and dialects. The emperor, with all his erudition, has many subjects with whom he is unable to converse. What a misfortune to mankind that the Tower of Babel was ever commenced! The architect who planned it should receive the execration of ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... by Babel's streams, The tyrant's jest, the Gentile's scorn; No censer round our altar beams, And mute our timbrel, trump, and horn. But THOU hast said, the blood of goat, The flesh of rams, I will not prize; A contrite heart, and humble ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... and such broideries of golden thread and great pearls for draperies and altar-cloths, as one may scarce dream of! And in their market-places, strewn with the spoils of the East are faces and voices of every clime and a very babel of tongues; more—far more than on our own Rialto; with schools for every language. And I saw a thing in Nikosia that in all my journeyings I ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... Priam's offspring loved their brother; Rome's great sire forgot his mother, When he slew his gallant twin, With inexpiable sin. See the giant shadow stride O'er the ramparts high and wide! When the first o'erleapt thy wall, Its foundation mourned thy fall. 80 Now, though towering like a Babel, Who to stop his steps are able? Stalking o'er thy highest dome, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... slowly toward the door as the chatter becomes a babel and the practising preliminary to the overture issues in long pious groans from ADAM ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... and the babel of voices, he hurried up the road. The unpolluted air was refreshing and he became calmer. Presently an idea flashed into his mind, which brought a flush to his cheeks and caused his eyes to kindle with a new ...
— The Unknown Wrestler • H. A. (Hiram Alfred) Cody
... decided that God and immortality did not exist, he would at once have become an atheist and a socialist. For socialism is not merely the labor question, it is before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form taken by atheism to-day, the question of the tower of Babel built without God, not to mount to heaven from earth but to set up heaven on earth. Alyosha would have found it strange and impossible to go on living as before. It is written: "Give all that thou hast to the poor and follow Me, if thou wouldst ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... lumber. But these significant works and personalities can never grow effete. They tell their own story to the succeeding generations, blessing them with visions of reality and preserving them from the Babel of meaningless words. ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... set time" to build Zion is come, when the people of God "take pleasure in her stones, and favour the dust thereof," Psal. cii. 13, 14, 16. The stones which the builders of Babel refused are now chosen for corner stones, and the stones which they chose do the builders of Zion now refuse: "They shall not take of thee a stone for a corner, nor a stone for foundations," Jer. li. 26. Those that have anything of Christ and of the image of God in them begin to creep out of the ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... root out a single sin, poured their distracting babble into any ears they could lay hold of, at the reception of Monseigneur. Unbelieving Philosophers who were remodelling the world with words, and making card-towers of Babel to scale the skies with, talked with Unbelieving Chemists who had an eye on the transmutation of metals, at this wonderful gathering accumulated by Monseigneur. Exquisite gentlemen of the finest breeding, which was at that remarkable time—and has been ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... his presence, babel broke out anew with his departure. Some one, standing on a sofa, caught up Otway's last word ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... sunshades of every hue, hats of every shape, dresses of every color, in groups outside the bathing huts, in long rows by the margin of the waves, or scattered here and there, really looked like immense bouquets on a vast meadow. And the Babel of sounds—voices near and far ringing thin in the light atmosphere, shouts and cries of children being bathed, clear laughter of women—all made a pleasant, continuous din, mingling with the unheeding breeze, and ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... for an encore, Ivan rose, in the midst of a little babel of "Bis!" and, taking the virtuoso of the world by the arm, led him to the piano. Well repaid, it seemed, in that moment, for the disappointment he had lately had to endure. For every face ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... confusion of tongues, work was knocked off on the Tower of Babel, if then all hands had turned to outdoor sports, the resultant scene would have been, I imagine, much like the picture that is presented on most Saturdays on the sixty-acre stretch of turf known as Indian Field, up in Van Cortlandt Park. Here there are ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... Benjie trembled from top to toe, like aspen leaves, but fient a word could we make common sense of at all. I wonder who educates these foreign creatures? it was in vain to follow him, for he just gab-gabbled away, like one of the stone masons at the Tower of Babel. At first I was completely bamboozled, and almost dung stupid, though I kent one word of French which I wanted to put to him, so I cried through, "Canna you ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... drew near, and pilgrims were flocking in from all quarters. The space fronting the church of the Holy Sepulchre becomes a kind of bazaar. I have never seen elsewhere in Asia so much commercial animation. When I entered the church I found a babel of worshippers. Greek, Roman, and Armenian priests were performing their different rites in various nooks, and crowds of disciples were rushing about in all directions—some laughing and talking, some begging, but most of them going about in a regular, methodical way to kiss the sanctified ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... set foot on shore, following a great negro porter, he was almost stupefied by the babel of tongues; but, fortunately, a policeman took him in hand and had him directed, together with his enormous collection of luggage, to ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... slender and straight. Between these were flat-boats, covered with green cloth, loaded with ladies and gentlemen, or else containing bands. Six barges, darting here and there, kept open space amid the swarms of small boats. Everywhere the eye swept over a riot of color, and the ear caught a babel of sound. As the last barge glided by, the man next me growled ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... a different sort of girl, she could no longer have refrained from bursting into tears. Fine ending to her rosy journey this!—a sensational "scene" played out before a house of loafers, and now the babel of thousand-tongued gossip, linking her name amorously (so she suspected) with the red-painted ne'er-do-well. Charming background, indeed, for a remeeting with ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... short. The bells had tintinabulated and musically welled into "Casabianca" which, in turn, had merged into "The Queen o' the May," and presently before he realized it Freedom was ringing in the closing notes of "America," and everybody was standing up, pupils filing out, guests shaking hands, babel reigning, and he had seen only a single, towering, handsome woman ...
— Moriah's Mourning and Other Half-Hour Sketches • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... plausibly be mistrusted of respect for visible accumulations of private wealth. Defoe's projects were of an extremely varied kind. The classification was not strict. His spirited definition of the word "projects" included Noah's Ark and the Tower of Babel, as well as Captain Phipps's scheme for raising the wreck of a Spanish ship laden with silver. He is sometimes credited with remarkable shrewdness in having anticipated in this Essay some of the greatest public improvements of modern times—the protection of seamen, the higher education ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... paced serene, Or Newton paused with wistful eye, Rush to the chace with hoofs unclean And Babel-clamour of ...
— Phantasmagoria and Other Poems • Lewis Carroll
... and a babel of parting cries, each 'bus-load of girls departed from the Hall to the station singing the farewell ...
— The Little Colonel's Christmas Vacation • Annie Fellows Johnston |
