"Billow" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was dead. The child was quieted, and again he woke up exclaiming that his father was drowned. A month later the news came that his father had, in fact, been swept off the deck of his smack by a billow. The widow then remembered how her son had wakened up and spoken of his father's death. Everyone said it was a miracle, and the affair caused a great sensation. The dates were compared, and it was found that the accident and the dream had very nearly ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... movement in itself is liable to frequent interruptions, and short counter-movements: even when the tide is coming in upon the shore, every wave retires after its advance; and he who follows incautiously the retreating waters, may be caught by some stronger billow, overwhelming again for an instant the spot which had just been left dry. A child standing by the sea-shore for a few minutes, and watching this, as it seems, irregular advance and retreat of the water, could not tell ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... exaggerated language, "the waves ran mountain high," which means from twenty to forty feet; perhaps, on this occasion, twenty-five feet from the trough of the sea to the crest of the billow. Even this is a great height to be tossed up and down on the water; and to the boys of the Young America the effect was grand, if not terrific. The deck was constantly flooded with water; additional life-lines had been stretched across from rail to rail, and every precaution ...
— Outward Bound - Or, Young America Afloat • Oliver Optic
... the steep, Sheeting, with clouds of snowy spray, Its lofty forehead, old and gray. With sudden shriek and cowering wing, To the wild cliff the sea-birds spring; Careering o'er the darken'd heaven, The clouds in warring heaps are driven; And crested high with lawny foam, Rushes the mighty billow home." ...
— Brannon's Picture of The Isle of Wight • George Brannon
... the night, Sadly to greet her,— Moon in her silver light, Stars in their glitter; Then sank the moon away Under the billow, Still wept the maid alone— There by ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray
... strong handsome youths, clad in short trousers and jacket of white silk, with fez-caps on their heads. On each side of the ship there are fourteen of these rowers, under whose vigorous exertions the barge flies forward over wave and billow like a dolphin. The beautifully regular movements of the sailors have a fine effect. The oars all dip into the water with one stroke, the rowers rise as one man, and fall back into their places in the ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... watched our pillow In thy tender, sleepless love, Lo, we dare the crosted billow; Mother, put thy trust above. Father! from thy guidance turning, O'er the deep our way we take; Keep the prayerful incense burning On ...
— Daughters of the Cross: or Woman's Mission • Daniel C. Eddy
... Bruin was turning to look the daring assailant in the face, the rogue had pitched himself back into his cave. No sooner that, than a very bulldog of a billow would attack him in the face. The serenity with which the impertinent assault was borne was complete. It was but a puff of silvery dust, powdering his mane with fresher brightness. Nothing would be left of bull but a little froth of all the foam displayed in the fierce onset. ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... swelled and mounted. So did the dance. Wave followed on ripple, sea on wave, and on the sea the foaming, far-flung billow. Limb after limb, the whole supple body of the blind dancer came into play; yet there was no visible tension. Never dead, never hard, but limp,—as limp as flowing, rushing water,—she whirled and swayed through all the emotions until, at the highest pitch of the mounting music, she fell ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... and winter surprises them on the deep, but brings them not the sight of the wished-for shore. The awful voice of the storm howls through the rigging. The labouring masts seem straining from their base; the dismal sound of the pumps is heard; the ship leaps, as it were, madly from billow to billow; the ocean breaks, and settles with engulfing floods over the floating deck, and beats with deadening, shivering weight against ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... haughty roar, Calms each wild wave and billow rude, Retreats submissive from the shore, And swells ...
— Hymns, Songs, and Fables, for Young People • Eliza Lee Follen
... her eye wandered about the vacant room, it fell upon a white and tempestuous ocean of counterpane, an ocean breaking into strange movements of wave and crest and billow. ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... ridden o'er the fair fields, o'er the waste, As the earth might bear the burden, with a weighty-footed haste; He hath cut in twain the mountain, he hath bridged the rolling main, He hath lashed the flood of Hel'le, bound the billow with a chain; And the rivers shrink before him, and the sheeted lakes are dry, From his burden-bearing oxen, and his hordes of cavalry; And the gates of Greece stand open; Ossa and Olympus fail; And the mountain-girt AEmo'nia spreads the river ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... night we went to the icy Pole, And there on the rocks we stood together, And saw the ocean before us roll. No moon shone down on the hermit sea, No cheering beacon illumed the shore, No ship on the water, no light on the lea, No sound in the ear but the billow's roar! But the wave was bright, as if lit with pearls, And fearful things on its bosom played; Huge crakens circled in foamy whirls, As if the deep for their sport was made, And mighty whales through the crystal ...
— Poems • Sam G. Goodrich
... sigh the winds of Heaven O'er your grave! While the billow mournful rolls And the mermaid's song condoles, Singing—glory to the souls Of ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... comparison can be made between the two evils. We hear sometimes of dreadful calamities at sea, where entire families are swept away; where, as on the 'Austria,' the only alternative is the mode of death, whether it shall be on the burning ship or beneath the cold, dark billow. What experience can be more awful, in the life of any man, than that which compelled this father to throw child after child into the sea, not with any hope of rescue, but merely to prolong for a few moments a life that ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... nearly nervous as she had accused her mother of being. But the conversation finally flagged so much that Joan began to worry about the weather once more. The wind was now frightful, the icy rain rattled against the windows, and at the open door Joan could hear billow on billow, crash on crash, shrieking blast on shrieking blast. She was unable to preserve her cheerfulness. Like all strong hearts in anxiety, she became silent. The platitudes of Denas, dropped without interest, annoyed her; she only moved her head ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... The billow of white smoke filled the northern sky. A whirl of gray wood ashes, light as air, floated on and ever on over Superior. The site of the mill, the squares where the piles of lumber had stood, glowed incandescence over which already ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... mists forewarned dawn. He had climbed the roll of stone slowly, picking each step, for, perhaps, two-hundred feet, when that trail sense of feel made him stoop to examine the ground. The roll of moraine he had climbed met another stone billow; and between the two ran a groove, a little narrow hardened tracing where the tracks of game going to and from watering place had packed and worked in between the rolling pebbles the ice dust ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... finished Gaston rang the bell, and when the billow rolled in, ordered a fresh bottle of wine and some choice cigars of a brand well known at Leslie's. Gurchy's head disappeared in foam again, and did not emerge therefrom till he was out ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume
... and while it was yet early morning, as Cerimon, a worthy gentleman of Ephesus, and a most skilful physician, was standing by the sea-side, his servants brought to him a chest, which they said the sea-waves had thrown on the land. 'I never saw,' said one of them, 'so huge a billow as cast it on our shore.' Cerimon ordered the chest to be conveyed to his own house and when it was opened he beheld with wonder the body of a young and lovely lady; and the sweet-smelling spices and rich casket of jewels made him conclude it was some great person who was thus strangely ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... never feel the same emotion twice: No two ships ever ploughed the self-same billow; The waters change with every fall and rise; So, Guilo, go contented to ...
— Poems of Passion • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... Aurora left her early pillow, And the heavens grew rosy-rich, and rare; Laughed the dewy plain and glassy billow, For the Golden God himself was there; And the vapour-screen Rose the hills between, Steaming up, ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun
... leaves, Hear a throbbing heart that grieves, Not for joys this world can give, But the life that spirits live: Spirit of the foaming billow, Visit thou my nightly pillow, Shedding o'er it silver dreams, Of the mountain brooks and streams, Sunny glades, and golden hours, Such as suit thy buoyant powers: Spirit of the starry night, Pencil out thy fleecy light, That my footprints still my lead To the blush-let Miscodeed,[109] Or the ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... end of the first quarter of the present century, the great poetical billow, which was not indeed caused by, but received an impulse from, the great political billow, the French Revolution (for they were cognate or co-radical movements), had quite spent itself, and English poetry was at a comparatively low ebb. The Poetical Revolution had done its work. ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... divine Helen, daughter of great Zeus, came and spoke gently to Hector, and said, "O brother! brother of vile me, who am a dog—would that, when my mother bare me, the storm-wind had snatched me away to a mountain, or a billow of the loud-roaring sea had swept me away, before all these evil things had befallen me! Would that I had been mated with a better man than Paris, whose heart is not sound, and never will be. But come, my brother, and sit by me; for ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... seek we, for the maiden's pillow, Far beyond the Atlantic's billow, Love's apple, and when we have found it, Draw the magic circle round it;(1) Fearless pluck it, then no charm That it bears may do us harm; Place it near the sleeper's head, It will bring love's visions nigh, And when the pleasing, dreams ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands
... yet bear not on your breath! Bear not the crash of bark far on the main, Bear not the cry of men, who cry in vain, The crew's dread chorus sinking into death! Oh! give not these, ye pow'rs! I ask alone, As rapt I climb these dark romantic steeps, The elemental war, the billow's moan; I ask the still, sweet tear, ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... down when there was a sudden flare as though the sun had risen, and I saw still a few heads bobbing and a few arms waving frantically around me. At the same instant a terrific detonation split the ears; and when I rose on the next bald billow, where the ship lay burning a few seconds before, there remained but a red-hot spine that hissed and dwindled for another minute, and then left a blackness through which every ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... the heart. These letters had the terrible and unanswerable power of all great, natural voices; and the chiefest of these are love and grief. Year upon year the recipient has sat dumb before these signs of human misery and hope. They have rolled upon the shore of life, a billow of solemn inspiration. I have called them a human argument for faith in the future life, and see no ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... of the dark blue sea, Our thoughts as boundless, and our souls as free, Far as the breeze can bear the billow's foam, Survey our empire, and behold our home. These are our realms, no limits to their sway. Our flag the sceptre ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... perpetual flux can delight us, Blown like a billow by winds of the sea: Still let us bow to the shrine of St. Vitus— Vite Sanctissime, ora ...
— Lyra Frivola • A. D. Godley
... you like!'" and Mark Twain rose, his snow-white hair gleaming above that brilliant assembly, it seemed that a world was speaking out in a voice of applause and welcome. With a great tumult the throng rose, a billow of life, the white handkerchiefs flying foam-like on its crest. Those who had gathered there realized that it was a mighty moment, not only in his life but in theirs. They were there to see this supreme embodiment of the American spirit as he scaled the mountain-top. He, too, realized the ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... point to rise, Than either Ocean's firths begin to toss And swell, and a dry crackling sound is heard Upon the heights, or one loud ferment booms The beach afar, and through the forest goes A murmur multitudinous. By this Scarce can the billow spare the curved keels, When swift the sea-gulls from the middle main Come winging, and their shrieks are shoreward borne, When ocean-loving cormorants on dry land Besport them, and the hern, her marshy haunts Forsaking, mounts above the soaring cloud. Oft, too, when ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... side, a period of tense silence or blurred murmurings was ended by a second great surge of cheers from front to rear. We all cheered till we were hoarse. Again we peered and listened and questioned each other, again came a roar of cheering like a sea billow. Again and again alternated the half silence and the uproar. Before we learned what was happening or had happened word came from mouth to mouth that we were going on. The press in front of us gradually melted away, we were able to sidle into the roadway, reform ranks ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... thought, as we hollowed his narrow bed And smoothed down his lonely pillow, How the foe and the stranger would tread o'er his head, And we far away on the billow! ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... their line of scalloped peaks across the entrance to the Notch. Beyond that shadowy vale, the swelling summits of Cannon Mountain rolled away to meet the tumbling waves of Kinsman, dominated by one loftier crested billow that seemed almost ready to curl and break out of green silence into snowy foam. Far down the sleeping Landaff valley the undulating dome of Moosilauke trembled ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... English, instead of laborious Latinised periods: and the secret of the art was his meaning what he said. It was the personal throb. The fire of a mind was translucent in Press columns where our public had been accustomed to the rhetoric of primed scribes. He did away with the Biscay billow of the leading article—Bull's favourite prose—bardic construction of sentences that roll to the antithetical climax, whose foamy top is offered and gulped as equivalent to an idea. Writing of such a kind as Rockney's was new to a land ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... of unstable equilibrium which the least touch upsets, and fell to crying. It took her some time to get down the waves of emotion so that speech would live upon them. At last it ventured out,—showing at intervals, like the boat rising on the billow, sinking into the hollow, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... did we passed once more into broken water, and the perils of the start were repeated, with the aggravation that we were now across the wind instead of being head on. Wave after wave burst over us, and time after time, as we hung suspended on the crest of some great billow, it seemed as if we never could right ourselves. But ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... far out upon the main, We plough the midnight billow, I gaze upon the stars, that shine And smile above thy pillow. And though far out upon the sea, My heart's still true to thee, my love, My heart's still ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... moving blindly across the wind with a thin trailing edge behind it and a rolling billow of descending mist as its forefront. It rolled up to and across a concrete highway, watched by perspiring motor cops who had performed miracles in clearing a path for it among the horde of sightseeing ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... the yard Rocked with the billow to and fro, Soon as her well-known voice he heard, He sighed and cast his eyes below; The cord slides swiftly through his glowing hands, And, quick as lightning, ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... no news for you, and am going to have less, for I a)n going into Norfolk. I have stayed till I have not one acquaintance left: the next billow washes me last off the plank. I have not cared to stir, for fear of news from Flanders; but I have convinced myself that there will be none. Our army is much superior to the Count de Saxe; besides, they have ten large towns to garrison, which will reduce their army to nothing; ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... sail and raises the waves up to heaven. The oars are snapped; the prow swings away and gives her side to the waves; down in a heap comes a broken mountain of water. These hang on the wave's ridge; to these the yawning billow shows ground amid the surge, where the sea churns with sand. Three ships the south wind catches and hurls on hidden rocks, rocks amid the waves which Italians call the Altars, a vast reef banking the ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... used to be conducted!)—I felt it was safe for me to wing my flight to fresh scenes and pastures new!—not that I wanted any "new pastures," having been a grass-widow for some time;—but having had enough of the "rolling billow"—(by the way, the rolling "Billow" at Stockbridge didn't roll fast enough)—I yearned for the silvery smoothness of Father Thames, so started for Henley with my faithful Eulalie—(I really must change her name, it sounds like a Swiss joedel); ...
— Punch, Or the London Charivari, Volume 103, July 16, 1892 • Various
... souls of the dead men disburdened And clean of the sins that they sinned, With a lovelier than man's life guerdoned And delight as a wave's in the wind, And delight as the wind's in the billow, Birds pass, and deride with their glee The flesh that has dust for its pillow ...
— Studies in Song • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... baby, the night is behind us, And black are the waters that sparkled so green, The moon o'er the combers, looks downward to find us At rest in the hollows that rustle between. Where billow meets billow, there soft be thy pillow; Ah, weary wee flipperling, curl at thy ease! The storm shall not wake thee, nor shark overtake thee, Asleep in the arms of the ...
— The Posy Ring - A Book of Verse for Children • Various
... suspense, and then we saw Roberts lean over the boat's quarter, grasp something, struggle with it, and finally the diver's form appeared on the gunwale and was dragged safely into the boat. At this moment a towering billow reared itself just beyond the labouring hull, sweeping down upon it, green and solid, with a curling crest of hissing, snow-white foam. The men in the gig fortunately saw it too in time, and, with a warning shout to each other, stretched ...
— The Cruise of the "Esmeralda" • Harry Collingwood
... he heard nothing else. The Wheat had broken from his control. For months, he had, by the might of his single arm, held it back; but now it rose like the upbuilding of a colossal billow. It towered, towered, hung poised for an instant, and then, with a thunder as of the grind and crash of chaotic worlds, broke upon him, burst through the Pit and raced past him, on and on to the eastward ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... and kindling every billow, The sun's shield shines 'neath many a golden spear, To lean with you, against this leafy pillow, To murmur words of love in this loved ear— To feel you bending like a bending willow, This is to be a ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... with the ship's head to the westward and the wind aft, under all sail; now rising to the summit of a glass-like billow, now sinking deep down into the valley to climb up the watery steep on the opposite side. We had touched at Rio, to obtain a supply of wood and water and fresh provisions; but I need not give a description of that magnificent ...
— Twice Lost • W.H.G. Kingston
... of its fury worked this wonder. For the craft came in on a tall billow that flung her, as a sling might, clean against the cliff's face, crumpling the bowsprit like paper, sending the foremast over with a crash, and driving a jagged tooth of rock five feet into her ribs beside the breastbone. So, for a moment it left her, ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... like the other woodpeckers, have a slightly dipping flight. They open and close their wings in quick succession, not slowly like the goldfinches; consequently their dips are not so pronounced. The line of their flight is a ripple rather than a billow. ...
— Some Summer Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... 'Tis where Ontario's billow like ocean's surge is curled, Where strong Niagara's thunders wake the echo of the world; Where red Missouri bringeth rich tribute from the west, And Rappahannock sweetly sleeps on ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... beating against the ship's side, to which it was still attached by part of the rigging. Three of the men who had clung to the shrouds of the foremast were swept overboard and drowned. Once more the wreck recoiled, rose again on a towering billow, and was launched on the rocks with such violence that she was forced forward and upwards several yards, and ...
— The Battle and the Breeze • R.M. Ballantyne
... A mighty billow flings its cloud of foam over the faces of Claude and the shrinking girl by his side, and blinds them with salt spray. But high as the tide is, the Chair is still above its reach, and although the wave may sprinkle them, it cannot swallow ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... day for the most part we ran East Southeast all along the shoare, within two leagues alwayes of the same, and found the land all as at the first, ful of woods and great rocks hard aboord the shoare, and the billow beating so sore, that the seas brake vpon the shoare as white as snow, and the water mounted so high that a man might easily discerne it 4. leagues off, in such wise that no boate could land there. Thus we ran vntil 12. of the clocke, and then they tooke the Sunne and after iudged ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of - The English Nation, Vol. 11 • Richard Hakluyt
... Just as when fairly out on the open sea we realize to the full its beauty and sense of infinity, so it is here. The farther we go the wider, more bewilderingly vast becomes the horizon: wave upon wave, billow upon billow, now violet-hued, with a tinge of gold; now deep brown, partly veiled with green, or roseate with sunlit clouds—the gray monotony of stone and waste is thus varied ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... passions are quieted, and in the inner kingdom is a great peace. The sight of God in Christ brings rest to every heart, and, Oh! the absence of the vision is the true secret of all disquiet. We are troubled and careful, and tossed from one stormy billow to another, and swept over by all the winds that blow, because we see not God, our Father, in the face of Jesus. 'Show us the Father, and it sufficeth us,' is either a puerile petition, or the deepest and noblest prayer of the human heart. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... vivacity of those convulsive movements, in the fire of those glances, in the strength of those limbs, beautiful even in contortion! It is then that a woman is carried away like an impetuous wind, darts forth like the flames of a conflagration, exhibits a movement like a billow which glides over the white pebbles. She is overcome with excess of love, she sees the future, she is the seer who prophesies, but above all, she sees the present moment and tramples on her husband, and impresses him with a sort ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part III. • Honore de Balzac
... language. But when Bourqueney began to ask what he had to say to the fond, he only talked of the practical difficulties, and ended without saying anything the least promising or satisfactory, though nothing decidedly the reverse. Bourqueney had previously been with Billow, who is just come back, and who desires no better on the part of his Government than to join in any conciliatory measure we may adopt; and Esterhazy, who is expected every hour, will, he doubts not, be equally well ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... scarcely had he reached the door And seized his staff of oak, When like a billow with a roar The ...
— The Book of Saints and Friendly Beasts • Abbie Farwell Brown
... ears; the oars are taken in utterly useless, the storm-wind sweeps the boat before it at full speed as though it had been a bit of straw. Selim and I sat with a large mackintosh sheet over our hunched backs, thus offering a breakwater to the waves; happily for us, the billow-heads were partly cut off and carried away bodily by the raging wind, and the opened fountains of the firmament beat down the breakers before they could grow to their full growth. Otherwise we were lost men; the southern shore was still two miles distant, and, as it ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... the other water-hosts living not only in the sea, but also in the rivers, lakes, cataracts, and fountains, is Ahtolaiset (inhabitants of Ahtola), "Water-people," "People of the Foam and Billow," "Wellamo's Eternal People." Of these, some have specific names; as Allotar (wave-goddess), Koskenneiti (cataract-maiden), Melatar (goddess of the helm), and in The Kalevala these are sometimes ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... smothering sheets dashed over them,—the two. And constantly the boat drew nearer, as I said; they were almost within hail; Dan saw her hair streaming on the wind; he waited only for the long wave. On it came, that long wave,—oh! I can see it now!—plunging and rearing and swelling, a monstrous billow, sweeping and swooning and rocking in. Its hollows gaped with slippery darkness, it towered and sent the scuds before its trembling crest, breaking with a mighty rainbow as the sun burst forth, it fell in a white blindness everywhere, rushed seething up the sand,—and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... his face, coughed out the smoke he had swallowed, and caught one refreshing gasp of sweet air blowing up the tunnel. Then the fresh air was driven back by the huge billow of smoke, and the heavy clouds settled about Jack. He could not have moved now had he wished. He was the prey of the thick suffocating smoke, and a swift merciful unconsciousness fell upon him and put an end to the agonies ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore
... bowling o'er the billow, Or him, less wise, Who chose rough bramble-bushes for a pillow, And scratched ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... of events which by their very nature, and despite any intrinsic interest that they may possess, are foredoomed to oblivion. They are merged in the general story of those greater events of which they were a part, as the thunder of a billow breaking on a distant beach is unnoted in the continuous roar. To how many having knowledge of the battles of our Civil War does the name Pickett's Mill suggest acts of heroism and devotion performed ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... yon snaw-cover'd thorn, Mournfu' and lane is the chirp o' the Robin, He looks through the storm, but nae shelter can see; Come, Robin, and join the sad concert wi' me. Oh, lang may I look o'er yon foam-crested billow, And Hope dies away like a storm-broken willow; Sweet Robin, the blossom again ye may see, But I'll ne'er see the blink o' his bonnie ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume IV. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... swims. I have bathed thee with the pleasant myrrh; Thy locks are dripping balm; Thou shalt not wander hence to-night, I'll stay thee with my kisses. To-night the roaring brine Will rend thy golden tresses; The ocean with the morrow light Will be both blue and calm; And the billow will embrace thee with a kiss as soft ...
— The Suppressed Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... been in his cabin only long enough to change his damp clothing for dry, when a fearful crash told him the ship had struck upon the rocks. In a moment he was back on the quarter deck. He found that a surging billow had struck the hinder part of the ship, tore off part of the sheathing, and carried away the watch-house in which two women were sleeping—all efforts to rescue them were in vain. Whilst the storm-tossed ocean raged and foamed around the devoted ship, and night shrouded all objects in her veil ...
— Hair Breadth Escapes - Perilous incidents in the lives of sailors and travelers - in Japan, Cuba, East Indies, etc., etc. • T. S. Arthur
... of Ages, cleft for me," Sung above a coffin lid; Underneath, all restfully, All life's joys and sorrows hid. Nevermore, O storm-tossed soul! Nevermore from wind or tide, Nevermore from billow's roll, Wilt thou need thyself to hide. Could the sightless, sunken eyes, Closed beneath the soft gray hair, Could the mute and stiffened lips Move again in pleading prayer, Still, aye still, the words would be,— "Let me hide myself ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... the scarcely laid foundations of the future. And because you have delayed the work of centuries for a few days, you think you have shattered the hourglass of Eternity. There is much pride in this grief, Lelia! But God will make this billow of stormy centuries, that for him are but a drop in the ocean, float by. The devouring hydra will perish for lack of food; and from its world-covering corpse a new race will issue, stronger and more patient than ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... upward, just missing the jagged crest. A gout of fire forward, another, and it went into a long flat glide, following the fall of a foothill to the plain beyond. It held course and reduced speed, letting the ground billow up to it rather than descending. There was a moment of almost-flight, almost-sliding, and then a rush of dust and smoke which over-took and passed them. When it cleared, they were part of the plain, ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn
... unlike the birds, they did not seem purposeless. It was evident they were moving, though one could not see rowers, oars, or splashes, for they progressed in short jumps and above the dulled rattle of a billow breaking on the pebbles, the faint click-thud of oars between thole-pins was plainly audible. I had an odd fancy that the six men were rowing through immensity, into eternity, to meet God; and that they would so continue ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... headed straight for Ascalon it dropped out of sight, and one unused to the trend of things might wonder if it had gone off on another line. Presently it would appear again, laboring up out of a dip, rise the intervening billow of land, small as a toy that one could hold in the hand, and sink out of sight again. This way it approached Ascalon, now promising, now denying, drawing into plainer sight with ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... Varney," said Anthony Foster. "He that is head of a party is but a boat on a wave, that raises not itself, but is moved upward by the billow which ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... the bold bird, between the billow's top And mountain's summit, sweeps around The muscle-clothed rock, and with light wing Sports on the ...
— Niels Klim's journey under the ground • Baron Ludvig Holberg
... slow! as we go. Swing his coffin to and fro; As of old the lusty billow Swayed him on his heaving pillow: So that he may fancy still, Climbing up the watery hill, Plunging in the watery vale, With her wide-distended sail, His good ship securely stands Onward to ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... contrasting boldly with the more lively and lovely green of the betel, the tamarind, and the banana. Every curve of the river is beautiful with an unexpectedness of its own,—here the sugar-cane swaying gracefully, there the billow-like lights and shadows of the supple, feathery bamboo, and everywhere ideal paradises of refreshment and repose. As we drift on the flowing thoroughfare toward the golden spires of Bangkok, kaleidoscopic surprises of summer salute ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... wand'ring fingers smooth my hair in silent token, And all my being answers to the tender mute caress. My head is resting on his breast for pillow, And as by music moved my soul is thrill'd; Flow on and clasp the land, O bursting billow! O breezes, tell the mountains many-rill'd! Our hearts now know each other, and ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... Keighley the country becomes stony; the trees are left behind, and there rises on all sides billow on billow of purple heather. The way is rough as the Pilgrim's Progress road to Paradise. These hillside moors are filled with springs that high up form rills, then brooks, then cascades or "becks," and along the Haworth road, wherever one of these ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... No mountain billow's huge uplifted crest Lashes the foaming beach with sullen roar; The smooth sea sparkles in unbroken rest, Or lightly rakes ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... beneath her bows, She drifted a dreary wreck, And a whooping billow swept the crew Like icicles from ...
— The Wreck of the Hesperus • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... cotton gloves and whipped her knee with them in awkward embarrassment. She had small, regular features of the kind that remain the same from childhood to old age, and her liver-colored hair rolled in a billow almost to her eyes. ...
— The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories • Margaret Collier Graham
... Whore; where be your Fighters? what mortal Fool durst raise thee to this daring, And I alive? by my just Sword, h'ad safer Bestride a Billow when the angry North Plows up the Sea, or made Heavens fire his food; Work me no higher; ...
— The Maids Tragedy • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... hundreds of voices, and a tremendous billow of cheers rang out, to send the eleven runners on their way with a firm determination lodged in each and every breast to strain himself to the utmost in order to be the ...
— Fred Fenton Marathon Runner - The Great Race at Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... it will be," he said to his wife, "to tread the bounding billow and inhale the invigorating oxygen of the sea, the sea, the boundless sea! I long to see it! To breathe in great drafts of life-giving air. I shall want to stand every moment on the prow of the steamer with ...
— Good Stories from The Ladies Home Journal • Various
... Massachusetts-Connecticut state-line he talked of Mexican revolutions, Theodore Roosevelt, Japanese art, vers libre, mushrooms, and such other topics as were of interest in the spring of 1914. But at the state-line, chancing a look out of the window, he saw the doming billow of blue mountains which marks the entrance to our Berkshire intervales, and a strange gleam came into his eyes. His square jaws set. His whole countenance was transformed. Turning back to me, he half ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... sand that rises yonder? One can scarcely tell, for it has as it were no shape, no outline; rather it seems like a great rosy cloud, or some huge, trembling billow, which once perhaps raised itself there, forthwith to become motionless for ever. . . . And from out this kind of mummified wave a colossal human effigy emerges, rose-coloured too, a nameless, elusive rose; emerges, ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... waters. None salutes and none replies; None heaves a groan or breathes a prayer They crouch on earth with tearless eyes, And clenched hands, and bristling hair. The rain pours on: no star illumes The blackness of the roaring sky. And each successive billow booms Nigher still and still more nigh. And now upon the howling blast The wreaths of spray come thick and fast; And a great billow by the tempest curled Falls with a thundering crash; and all is o'er. In what is ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... I found the weather overcast, the sea gray but calm. Hardly a billow. I hoped to encounter Captain Nemo there—would he come? I saw only the helmsman imprisoned in his glass-windowed pilothouse. Seated on the ledge furnished by the hull of the skiff, I inhaled the sea's ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... prevail on this far coast—beliefs more primitive, assuredly, than the gentle faith which hangs white lanterns before the tombs. Some hold that the drowned never journey to the Meido. They quiver for ever in the currents; they billow in the swaying of tides; they toil in the wake of the junks; they shout in the plunging of breakers. 'Tis their white hands that toss in the leap of the surf; their clutch that clatters the shingle, or seizes the ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... contest followed. The girls suggested all the poetical names they could think of from Sea Rover to Bounding Billow. The boys, after a few wild guesses, settled down to the names of places in ...
— Chicken Little Jane on the Big John • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... writing he heard a voice which attracted his attention in spite of himself. Seeing that the waves were rolling in higher than ever, he looked all round, and presently saw a lovely lady floating gently toward him upon the crest of a huge billow, her long hair spread all about her; in one hand she held a mirror, and in the other a comb, and instead of feet she had a beautiful tail like a fish, with ...
— The Blue Fairy Book • Various
... the way along With many a neat little epigram, While dear Pease-blossom before him swam On a billow of lovely moonlit song, Telling us why they had left their home In Sherwood, and had hither come To dwell in this magical scented clime, This dim old Forest of sweet ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... the loud choral song was rolling through the darkness and the silence. Some one was whistling, keeping time to the refrain, and this shrill sound, which pierced the ear, ran ahead of the billow of powerful voices. Foma looked in that direction and saw the tall, black wall of forest, the bright fiery spot of the bonfire shining upon it, and the misty figures surrounding the fire. The wall of forest was like a breast, and the fire ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... In dreams, ere yet he came, with awe The Red One's son, so fierce and bold, In combat with his hero old— The king-like Goll of valorous might— A stormy billow in the fight No foe ...
— Elves and Heroes • Donald A. MacKenzie
... one huge billow rising, curving, high as the gaff of the main, it seemed to him, as he grasped at the coil of the main halyards. Down came the tons of water, booming on the deck that bent under the blow, spilling in a great cataract that swashed ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... and toss on my pillow, As a ship without rudder or spars Is tumbled and tossed on the billow, 'Neath the glint and the glory of stars. 'Tis midnight and moonlight, and slumber Has hushed every heart but my own; O why are these thoughts without number Sent to me by the ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... hauntingly in Eric's ears as his boat hit the first incoming billow. The former rescue in the moonlight had held a quick thrill, but it had been nothing like this tense eager race in the darkness. Nearly a quarter of an hour had passed in the station-house before the rescued man ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Life-Savers • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... our fire until the enemy was almost upon us. At the right instant our rifles poured out a perfect billow of death. Painted bodies reeled and fell; horses sank down, or rushed mad with pain, upon their fallen riders; shrieks of agony mingled with the unearthly yells; while above all this, the steady roar of our guns—not a wasted bullet in all the line—carried ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... flame: I know not what it bore of freight or host, 40 But white it was as an avenging ghost. It levelled strong Euphrates in its course; Supreme yet weightless as an idle mote It seemed to tame the waters without force Till not a murmur swelled or billow beat: Lo, as the purple shadow swept the sands, The prudent crocodile rose on his feet And shed appropriate ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... grow pale, and pray; Ye fling its floods around you, as a bird Flings o'er his shivering plumes the fountain's spray. See! to the breaking mast the sailor clings; Ye scoop the ocean to its briny springs, And take the mountain-billow on your wings, And pile the wreck of ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... we on out of the city, and what a surging tide of life and motion meets the eye, as if all nations under heaven had dashed their waves of population on this Judean shore! A noisy, wrathful, tempestuous mob, billow on billow, waver and rally round some central object, which it conceals from view. Parthians, Medes, Elamites, dwellers in Mesopotamia and Egypt, strangers of Rome, Cretes and Arabians, Jew and Proselyte, convoked from the ends ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... fireside, "the battle, I trust, is gained. Charge with your column. The disordered troops will rally in your rear." Like a rock, Desaix, with his solid phalanx of ten thousand men, met the on-rolling billow of Austrian victory. At the same time Napoleon dispatched an order to Kellerman, with his cavalry, to charge the triumphant column of the Austrians in flank. It was the work of a moment, and the whole aspect ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... cable of the Scriptures. Yet what depths of the soul does Jonah's deep sealine sound! what a pregnant lesson to us is this prophet! What .. a noble thing is that canticle in the fish's belly! How billow-like and boisterously grand! We feel the floods surging over us; we sound with him to the kelpy bottom of the waters; sea-weed and all the slime of the sea is about us! But what is this lesson that ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... array Steals o'er the ocean, And with departed day Hushed seems its motion. Slowly o'er yon blue coast Onward she's treading, 'Till its dark line is lost, 'Neath her veil spreading. The bark on the rippling deep Hath found a pillow, And the pale moonbeams sleep On the green billow. Bound by her emerald zone Venice is lying, And round her marble crown Night winds are sighing. From the high lattice now Bright eyes are gleaming, That seem on night's dark brow Brighter stars beaming. Now o'er the bright lagune Light barks are dancing, And 'neath the silver ...
— Poems • Frances Anne Butler
... But the spirits of the braves Hov'ring o'er, Whose antiquated graves Its still water laves On the shore. With an Indian's stealthy tread It goes sleeping in its bed, Without joy or grief, Or the rustle of a leaf, Without a ripple or a billow, Or the sigh of a willow, From the Lyndeboro' hills To the Merrimack mills. With a louder din Did its current begin, When melted the snow On the far mountain's brow, And the drops came together ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... full many a measure; It has thrilled with love's red wine; It has hope and health, and youth's rare wealth— Oh rich is this heart of mine. Yet it is not glad—it is wild and mad Like a billow before it breaks; And its ceaseless pain is worse than vain, Since it knows not why ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... mariner to port e'er fled From the dark billow, when some tempest's nigh, As from tumultuous gloomy thoughts I fly— Thoughts by the force of goading passion bred: Nor wrathful glance of heaven so surely sped Destruction to man's sight, as does that ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... a crest of foam scarce appearing ahead, before it was glittering under the lugger's bottom. Occasionally a pursuing sea cast the stern upward, as if about to throw it in advance of the bows; but le Feu-Follet was too much accustomed to this treatment to be disturbed, and she ever rose on the billow, like a bubble, and then the glancing arrow scarce surpassed the speed with which she hastened forward, as if to ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... snapped like a pistol shot. The ship rebounded; then drove before the back-wash of the angry sea. With no fate possible but the wall of rocks ahead, the terrorized crew began heaving the dead overboard in the moonlight; but another roaring billow smashed the St. Peter squarely broadside. The second hawser ripped back with the whistling rebound of a whip-lash, and Ofzyn was in the very act of dropping the third and last anchor, when straight as a bullet to the mark, as if hag-ridden ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... bold, harsh, immitigable, yet softened by their aspect of gray endurance. Hacked and scored, tossed, fissured, and torn, weather-beaten and bleached, their bluntness becomes grave, their hardness pathetic. About their caverned bases the billow thunders in perpetual assault, proclaiming the purpose of the sea to reclaim what it has lost. Above, the frost inserts its potent lever, and flings down from time to time some bellowing fragment to its ally below. The shores, as if ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... strength, upon Berlin; he himself hastened to Macdonald's beaten troops in Silesia, and rallied them for a new assault upon Bluecher. All was in vain. Ney, advancing on Berlin, was met by the Prussian general Billow at Dennewitz, and totally routed (Sept. 6): Bluecher, finding that Napoleon himself was before him, skilfully avoided battle, and forced his adversary to waste in fruitless marches the brief interval which he had ed from his watch on Schwarzenberg. Each conflict with the enemy, each vain and exhausting ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... Spirit beautiful and swift— A love in desolation masked—a Power Girt round with weakness; it can scarce uplift The weight of the superincumbent hour; Is it a dying lamp, a falling shower, A breaking billow;—even whilst we speak Is it not broken? On the withering flower The killing sun smiles brightly: on a cheek The life can burn in blood, even while the ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... was glowing with a reddish yellow light. This billow of candles which crossed it illuminated the lower arches of the side-aisles, the depth of the chapels, and glittered upon the glass of some shrine or upon the gold of some tabernacle. The rays even penetrated into the apse, and the sepulchral ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola
... baby, the night is behind us, And black are the waters that sparkled so green. The moon, o'er the combers, looks downward to find us At rest in the hollows that rustle between. Where billow meets billow, then soft be thy pillow, Ah, weary wee flipperling, curl at thy ease! The storm shall not wake thee, nor shark overtake thee, Asleep in the arms ...
— The Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... Marshal and myself had cast To stop him as he outward pass'd; But, lighter than the whirlwind's blast, He vanish'd from our eyes, Like sunbeam on the billow cast That glances ...
— The Prose Marmion - A Tale of the Scottish Border • Sara D. Jenkins
... summit had reached the river's surface did it shiver itself. Then there was a burst as of an exploded mine. The saffron waters of the Salmon shot upward until they topped the main rampart, and there separated into a cloud of spray which rained down in a deluge. Out from the fallen mass rushed a billow which gushed across the channel, thrashed against the high bank, then inundated it until the alder thickets on its crest whipped their tips madly. A giant charge of fragments of every size ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... steaming across the billow, That should have brought him to his mother's knee; Did warning dreams hover around her pillow, Of the dear face she never more shall see? She sits at home deeming that all is well, Who shall the tale ...
— Verses and Rhymes by the way • Nora Pembroke
... and traffic of the city, Freshwater Bay affords a delightful retreat. During the bright days of summer the sea breaks in gentle murmur on the sand and shingle of the beach, but in winter when lashed by S.W. Gales "it tumbles a billow on chalk and sand." The roar of the ocean can be heard for miles inland. The esplanade shown in the picture has been destroyed by the breakers. Temporary repairs have been effected, but a fierce controversy is still raging as to the ultimate ...
— Pictures in Colour of the Isle of Wight • Various
... ground, is not any rupture or division of the air causing a vacuum, but purely the actual stroke of the voice, which when carried up in a great mass and with violence, raises a sort of tempest and billow, as ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... are all, in their adult state, locomotive beings. They float freely and incessantly through the ocean, either impelled by their own efforts, or driven by storm and billow. They for the most part frequent the open seas, and shun the shore, their delicate frames being endangered by the perennial strife between land and water. Being designed for constant motion, for the navigation of the great waters, their entire organisation ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... the destroying pororocca—a vast wave rising across the whole width of the stream, to the height of twelve or fifteen feet— sweeps up the stream. Advancing noiselessly over the deeper portions of the river-bed, it rises into an angry billow, with a fearful roar when passing over a shallow, or meeting any impediment in its course. A French traveller describes an island where he and his companions had rested on their voyage down the stream. They had happily gone over ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... world flowed under us: the hills Billow on billow of umbrageous green Heaved us, aghast, to fresh horizons, seen One rapturous instant, blind with flash of rills And silver-rising storms and dewy stills Of dripping boulders, till the dim ravine Drowned us again in leafage, whose serene Coverts grew ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... goodness, see that!" and the Englishman pointed to the east. A flood of delicate pink light was now pouring into the vast body of gray and was slowly driving the more sombre color toward the west. The line of separation was marked—so marked, indeed, that it seemed a vast, rose-colored billow rolling, widening and sweeping onward like a swell of the ocean shoreward. On it came rapidly, till the whole landscape was magically changed. The flowers, the trees, the grass, the waters of the lakes, the white buildings, the costumes of the people in ...
— The Land of the Changing Sun • William N. Harben
... words in such a scene! Yon rosy mists on high careering,— The Moorish cavaliers who fleet With hawk and hound and distant cheering,— The dipping sail puffed to the gale, The prow that spurns the billow's fawning,— How can they fade to dimmer shade, And how this day ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... fearful wretch, would that, on the day when first my mother brought me forth, a destructive tempest of wind had seized and borne me to a mountain, or into the waves of the much-resounding ocean, where the billow would have swept me away before these doings had occurred. But since the gods have thus decreed these evils, I ought at least to have been the wife of a braver man, who understood both the indignation and the many reproaches of men. But this ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... were now reaching the other shore. Having exhausted his arrows, he took up his javelin, and although already nearly half engulfed, with his arm alone above the water, he hurled it, a powerless weapon, against the unknown God whom he still braved from the depths of the abyss. A mighty billow, which rolled two or three times over the edge of the sea, ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... way, and all but speak: The sun-born blood suffused her neck, and threw O'er her clear nut-brown skin a lucid hue, Like coral reddening through the darken'd wave, Which draws the diver to the crimson cave. Such was this daughter of the southern seas, Herself a billow in her energies, To bear the bark of others' happiness. Nor feel a sorrow till their joy grew less: Her wild and warm yet faithful bosom knew No joy like what it gave; her hopes ne'er drew Aught from experience, that chill ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... rest, Whom the fates sever From his true maiden's breast, Parted for ever? Where, through groves deep and high, Sounds the far billow; Where early violets die Under the willow. Eleu loro, &c. Soft shall ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... swiftly ran Through the loud-glorying sea that it began To lose its late gained lordship of the land, Uprose the billow like an angered man, And flung its prone strength far along the sand; Almost, almost to the old bound, the dark And ...
— Ride to the Lady • Helen Gray Cone
... three servants and A tutor, the licentiate Pedrillo, Who several languages did understand, But now lay sick and speechless on his pillow And, rocking in his hammock, longed for land, His headache being increased by every billow; And the waves oozing through the port-hole made His berth a little ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... "Hugged in the clinging billow's clasp, From seaweed fringe to mountain heather, The British oak with rooted grasp Her slender handful holds together, With cliffs of white and bowers of green, And ocean narrowing to caress her, And hills and threaded streams ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... on the present occasion, it must be confessed there was not much bounding, nor much billow. Nor, again, would it have been easy for any one to see her, even if he had been brought close to her; for the simple reason that the "Parson," as she went on her way, carrying Zac and his fortunes, had become involved in a fog bank, in the midst of which ...
— The Lily and the Cross - A Tale of Acadia • James De Mille
... simply a continuation of the national road; there is a narrower one below, which used to be called the Rue de la Paille, because the cottages lining it were formerly all thatched with cane straw; and there is one above it, edging the cane-fields that billow away to the meeting of morne and sky. There is nothing of architectural interest, and all is sombre,—walls and roofs and pavements. But after you pass through the city and follow the southern route that ascends the Sguinau promontory, you can ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... enter there. The outside was for him a tiresome visitor. The war? Oh, I know, I know. Has it come? Let it wait.... And the war did wait at the door, patiently. War knew that it would have its turn. He knew that also; that is why he had no shame in his egotism. The rising billow of death was about to seize him. So he owed death nothing in advance. Nothing. Let death come back again at the date of the contract! Up to that day let death be silent! Ah, up to then at least he did not want to lose anything ...
— Pierre and Luce • Romain Rolland
... faces they raised their heavy hands and matched their might in deadly strife. Hereupon the Bebrycian king even as a fierce wave of the sea rises in a crest against a swift ship, but she by the skill of the crafty pilot just escapes the shock when the billow is eager to break over the bulwark—so he followed up the son of Tyndareus, trying to daunt him, and gave him no respite. But the hero, ever unwounded, by his skill baffled the rush of his foe, and he quickly noted the ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... of his house, Nimbus, his wife, and two men whom he had employed were engaged in cutting the tobacco which waved—crinkled and rank, with light ygjlowish spots showing here and there upon the great leaves—a billow of green in the autumn wind. The new-comers halted and watched the process for a moment as they rode up to the barn, while the sheriff explained ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... of Skerryvore and Rhu-val were quenched in fog, and the men sat prisoned high up in their iron drum, that then resounded with the lashing of the sprays. Fear sat with them in their sea-beleaguered dwelling; and the colour changed in anxious faces when some greater billow struck the barrack, and its pillars quivered and sprang under the blow. It was then that the foreman builder, Mr. Goodwillie, whom I see before me still in his rock-habit of undecipherable rags, would get his fiddle down and strike up human minstrelsy amid the music of the storm. ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... wild breath of it was in our faces. Then we heard voices singing together in a sailor-song which had a refrain not quite suited to the day, according to common opinions, having a refrain about a lad who sailed away on bounding billow and left poor Jane to wear the willow; but what's a lass's tears of brine to the Spanish Main and a flask ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins
... spicery. The azaleas were already budding, the ceanothus getting ready its lilac livery for spring. On the green upland which climbed Red Mountain at its southern aspect the long spike of the monkshood shot up from its broad-leaved stool, and once more shook its dark-blue bells. Again the billow above Smith's grave was soft and green, its crest just tossed with the foam of daisies and buttercups. The little graveyard had gathered a few new dwellers in the past year, and the mounds were placed two by two by the little paling until they reached Smith's grave, and there ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... of a boat:— There was once a boat on a billow: Lightly she rocked to her port remote, And the foam was white in her wake like snow, And her frail mast bowed when the breeze would blow, And bent like a wand ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... had occurred to him, and seemed incredible even when her own lips told it. She had been right in fearing the effect this knowledge would have upon him. It stung his pride, wounded his heart, and forever marred his faith in love and friendship. As the truth broke over him, cold and bitter as a billow of the sea, she saw gathering in his face the still white grief and indignation of an outraged spirit, suffering with all a woman's pain, with all a man's intensity of passion. His eye grew fiery and stern, the veins rose dark upon his forehead, the lines about the ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... you see them?" said Fergus, pointing to a great billow that fell back at the moment, and lay churning in the gulf beneath them. "Are they not in fact wasting the ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... helpless bankruptcy, with the poor consolation that, though legally responsible, he was not morally bound to pay other people's debts. But Scott's own sanguine carelessness had been partly to blame for the Ballantyne failure; and he faced the billow as it suddenly appeared, bowed to it in grief but not in shame, and, while not pretending to any stoicism, instantly resolved to devote the remainder of his life to the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... coach from Canterbury, 17 miles in an hour and a half. Fair blows the wind over the azure blue billow. "You will breakfast at Ostend," says the Captain, "to-morrow." "Oh, that Louisa were here!" says Donald. "She would die of delight," says Uncle, "and does not Uncle say true?" Conceive the view from Nottingham Castle on the evening we left Alderley ... a noble precipice, frowning ...
— Before and after Waterloo - Letters from Edward Stanley, sometime Bishop of Norwich (1802;1814;1814) • Edward Stanley
... pebbles, dashed with red or clouded with mazarine. Bell would hold them up to her ear, and listen to the "little whispers," as she called them; but the boy would skim them along the wave-tips, and shout when some great billow caught one, and hurled it back scornfully at ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... Naught but ruin can assuage, Swift, now, without sound, Creeps stealthily Up to the shore— Creeps, creeps and undulates; As one dissimulates Till, swayed by hateful frenzy, Through passion grown immense, he Bursts forth hostilely; And rising, a smooth billow— Its swelling, sunlit dome Thinned to a tumid ledge With keen, curved edge Like the scornful curl Of lips that snarl— O'ertops itself and breaks Into a raving foam; So springs upon the shore With a hungry roar; Its first fierce anger slakes On the stony shallow; And runs up on the land, ...
— Dreams and Days: Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... Etruscan city of Veii, the Troy of Italy. The view in this direction is bounded by the advanced guard of the Sabine range, the blue peak of Soracte looking, as Lord Byron graphically says, like the crest of a billow about to break. In front, at your feet, is the city, broken up into the most picturesque masses by the irregularity of the ground; here and there a brighter light glistening on some stately campanile or cupola, and flashing back ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan |
