"Babel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... enemy the babel redoubled. There were groans and cat-calls. Along with the derisive "Joeys!" the rebel diggers hurled any term of abuse that came to ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... point at which children so frequently and readily learn control as in the matter of speech. The family where all speak at once, where a babel of sounds leads to a rivalry of vocal organs, is not only a nuisance to the neighbors, it is a school of uncontrolled action to the children. Just to learn to wait, even after the thought is formed into words, until ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... west of Athens; and you find in their myth of the Milesian invasion and conquest two principal leaders called Heber and Ith, or Heth. That is supposed to be comparatively modern—about the time of Solomon's Temple. But these independent Irish myths go back to the fall of the Tower of Babel, and they have there an ancestor, grandson of Japhet, named Fenius Farsa, and they ascribe to him the invention of the alphabet. They took their ancient name of Feine, the modern Fenian, from him. Oddly enough, that is the name which the Romans knew the Phoenicians by, and to them also is ascribed ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... than the people of most of our northern States, who have such a propensity for setting the church on the summit of some high hill where not a tree or shrub adorns the grounds, and the aspiring steeple seems, like Babel, to be striving vainly to reach ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens
... were 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 is spread before it, with its many churches and towers, and for many miles you see ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... acquaintance of Peter, I supported the above resolution. He gave me his hand and pulled me up on the platform, from among the multitude. The whole of that Wednesday morning, my tent on the Eureka had been a regular Babel. Foreigners from all quarters of the globe and of the diggings, came to inquire from me what was the matter concerning so much excitement as then prevailed on Ballaarat. I translated for them the news from our 'Ballaarat ...
— The Eureka Stockade • Carboni Raffaello
... formed and active, with black eyes, intelligent countenances, dark-olive, or, I should rather say, copper complexions and coarse black hair, but not woolly like the negroes. They appeared to be talking continually. In the forecastle there was a complete Babel. Their language is extremely guttural, and not pleasant at first, but improves as you hear it more, and is said to have great capacity. They use a good deal of gesticulation, and are exceedingly animated, saying with their might what their tongues find to say. ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... colloquial, but quite good, showing here and there what we often notice in the speech of those who have been educated in isolated places far from that babel of polite energies which we call the world; something that may be described as a bookish cast appearing oddly in the midst of phrasing distinctly rustic and local,—a peculiarity not easy to transfer from ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... village tragedy. I can remember when a fire in a big German commercial town was proclaimed by a beating drum, the noisy parade of fire-men, the clanging of bells, and all the hullaballoo that panic and curiosity could make. But last year, in Berlin, looking at houses like the tower of Babel, I said something of fire, and was told that no one felt nervous nowadays, the arrangements for dealing with it ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... see what men might be whose fathers had never studied Virgil, had never been conquered by Caesar, and never been ruled by the wisdom of Gaius or Papinian. By the same step I had journeyed forth out of that comfortable zone of kindred languages, where the curse of Babel is so easy to be remedied; and my new fellow-creatures sat before me dumb like images. Methought, in my travels, all human relation was to be excluded; and when I returned home (for in those days I still projected my return) I should ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... that we in Paris build round about public monuments that remain unbuilt; the grotesque aspect of the mart as a whole was in keeping with the seething traffic of various kinds carried on within it; for here in this shameless, unblushing haunt, amid wild mirth and a babel of talk, an immense amount of business was transacted between the Revolution of 1789 and the Revolution ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... soul, and its accompanying wisdom, will beget the strength, purity, virtue, and truth which can alone restore order and beauty upon the earth; that all "systems," and mechanical, outward means and appliances to the end, will but increase the Babel of confusion, as things unfitted to it, and altogether extraneous and hopeless. "Systems!" It is living, truthful men we want; these will make their own systems; and let those who doubt the truth humbly watch and wait until it is manifest to them, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... two enfranchised rogues, easy at heart, making off later to their Eastcheap tavern, and the passing of a friendly cup. But now, alas, today, all of the rooms of the house are fat and thick with people. There is a confusion of tongues as when work on the tower of Babel was broken off. There is no escape. If it were one's good luck to be a waiter, one could at least console himself that it ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... ambassador. For one instant their eyes met, but that one glance seemed to draw them to each other, to penetrate to the very depths of their souls. Both knew that each had only been looking for the other, and at that moment there seemed to fall a silence upon both hearts, even in the midst of the babel of voices, and all their surroundings to vanish and be swept away by the force of their ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... of conscience, the right of man to life and the pursuit of happiness,—all these are foibles of the West which it has been the chief business of caste to crush; and upon their ruin it has erected this mighty tower of Babel. In India, it has been the business of men, from time immemorial, not to do what they think to be right, nor to find out, every one for himself, what they consider to be the best and to act according to the dictates of conscience; ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... baggage trains which literally covered almost every yard of space in the small town. The temporary advanced Headquarters were established in the market place, the appearance of which defies description. The babel of voices, the crying of women and children, mingled with the roar of the guns and the not far distant crack of rifles and machine guns, made a deafening noise, amidst which it was most difficult to keep a clear eye ...
— 1914 • John French, Viscount of Ypres
... in his ear, 'Drop on the tackle secretly a drop from the phial.' This he did, spreading his garments, and commanded the tackle to speak. And the tackle spake, each portion of it, confusedly as the noise of Babel. So the King marvelled greatly, and said, ''Tis a greater wonder than the talking hawk, the talking tackle. Wullahy! it ennobleth barbercraft! Yet it were well to comprehend the saying of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... To tell the truth, Valeria was speaking in a tongue that was a babel of Greek and Latin, although she fondly imagined it to be the former, and Semiramis could hardly ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... 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 and noise. ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty
... another the life of Frederick the Great, a third was patiently droning forth Napoleon's war on Europe, while over on the window-seat the other two were racing through volumes one and two of Carlyle's French Revolution. The room was a perfect babel of sound. But the big man sat and smoked his pipe, his honor safe and the morrow secure. In later years, whatever might happen across the sea would find this fellow fully prepared, a wise, intelligent judge of the ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... waste in fighting, lads," I cried, for I felt that the ship was fast settling under our feet. But my voice was completely drowned in the babel of angry yells that instantly arose, for it appeared that the men were, after their own fashion, rivals for leadership in the forecastle, and each man had his own partisans, every one of whom instantly took up the quarrel of his own favourite, and in another moment the whole of them ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... crest of the earliest wave, and obtained a corner near the corridor. She meant to leave her handbag there, stroll up and down the station for a few minutes, mainly to look at the cosmopolitan crowd, and perhaps buy some fruit; but the babel of English, German, French, and Italian, mixed with scraps of Russian and Czech, that raged round a distracted conductor warned her that the wiser ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... was absolute silence. Then surprise, amazement and consternation rose in a babel of sound, but over all Lady Barbara's ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... in his task; he had raised treasures and images one above another; he had strengthened the base and heightened the summit of this precious and sacred heap; he had repaired and rebuilt, whenever it crumbled and fell, this new Babel that he longed to rear to the Olympus of the temple roof, with a resolute patience and perseverance that no failure or fatigue ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... was crowded with young people when we arrived, and a babel of voices burst on us as we drew rein at the door. After helping the girls from the pung, Addison and I put up the horses at a farmer's barn near by. When we again reached the schoolhouse, a gigantic man in an immense, shaggy buffalo coat ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... comment from high authority. Said Charles the First, writing to Buckingham, "The Fleming painter prides himself on being able to pass for an Englishman, but his English is so larded with French, Dutch and Italian that we think he must have been employed on the Tower of Babel." ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... bustle and confusion on board. The ship was like a floating Babel. The decks were crowded with hucksters, boatmen, landlords, and women of undoubted character; all upon one errand, and actuated by one motive; united in purpose though divided by interest, they were bent upon fleecing poor Jack of his hard-earned money. No doubt ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... stench and babel of the caravansary, secluded by the very denseness of the many-minded swarm, five other Rajputs and Mahommed Gunga—all six, according to their turbans, followers of Islam—discussed matters that appeared to bring ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... 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 by an Infinite Wisdom, and leads, though ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... They have electric motors and lights, paved broadways and boulevards, substantial business blocks, schools, churches, factories, and foundries. The lusty, titanic clang of boiler making may be heard there, and plenty of the languid music of pianos mingling with the babel noises of commerce carried on in a hundred tongues. The main streets are crowded with bright, wide-awake lawyers, ministers, merchants, agents for everything under the sun; ox drivers and loggers in stiff, gummy overalls; back-slanting dudes, well-tailored and shiny; and fashions and bonnets ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... he, "hold your tongues, you brats! You have come, M. d'Artagnan, and all my good principles fly away. With you, as usual, comes disorder. Babel is revived. Ah! Good Lord! Ah! the wild little wretches!" And the worthy Bazin distributed right and left blows which increased the cries of his scholars by ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... ocean. They are literally "older than the hills." They were exposed to a host of rapidly changing conditions, very different in different areas. This prepares us for the fact that the worms represent a stage in animal life corresponding fairly well to the Tower of Babel in biblical history. The animal kingdom seems almost to explode into a host of fragments. Our genealogical tree fairly bristles with branches, but the branches do not seem to form any regular whorls or ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... coincided. And this opinion was strengthened to absolute conviction when, as the sun sank behind the western mountains and the soft, tropical night settled down upon the valley, our ears were assailed by a perfect babel of sound emanating from the town, which, even at the distance of half a mile, rendered sleep almost impossible. What it would have been like to be lodged in the midst of the storm focus I ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... type of the two; but both are weak and unbalanced. And it is only these two types, the sentimental humanitarian and the sentimental brutalitarian, whom one hears in the modern babel. Yet you very rarely meet either of them in a train. You never meet anyone else in a controversy. The man you meet in a train is like this man that I met: he is emotionally decent, only he is intellectually doubtful. So far from luxuriating in the loathsome things that could be "done" to ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... with couriers going and returning, the Parlement, in this state of continual explosion that shall cease neither night nor day, waits the issue. Awakened Paris once more inundates those outer courts; boils, in floods wilder than ever, through all avenues. Dissonant hubbub there is; jargon as of Babel, in the hour when they were first smitten (as here) with mutual unintelligibilty, and the people had ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... slowly through the Vier Marchi, nodding right and left to people who greeted him. It was Saturday and market day in Jersey. The square was crowded with people. All was a cheerful babel; there was movement, colour everywhere. Here were the high and the humble, hardi vlon and hardi biaou—the ugly and the beautiful, the dwarfed and the tall, the dandy and the dowdy, the miser and the spendthrift; young ladies gay in silks, laces, and scarfs from Spain, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... sauntered to and fro; for there cab and hansom rarely ventured, and from window over window the inhabitants looked forth in pleased contemplation of the scene. Dyson made his way slowly along, mingling with the crowd on the cobblestones, listening to the queer babel of French and German and Italian and English, glancing now and again at the shop windows with their levelled batteries of bottles, and had almost gained the end of the street, when his attention was arrested by a small shop at the corner, a vivid contrast to its neighbours. ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... babel of suggestions ensued. Bill waited a few impatient minutes and executed a taunting, barbaric war dance to the center of the field. Carefully planned campaigns were not for him; his force boasted ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... kerchief, like dogs let loose from the leash—every man but the astonished Colonel. For an instant the place was a pandemonium, a Babel. In a twinkling the kerchief was torn, amid cries of the wildest enthusiasm, into as many fragments as there were ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman
... "At first you have only a confused impression that the world is on fire with electric lights. To ride through the crowded theater district at night, with the great electric signs blinking at you from all sides—with the honking of the motor horns making a very Babel—with the crowds on the sidewalk, still hurrying, but for such a different reason—men and women in evening dress, all bound for one or other of the gay restaurants or theaters close by. And then the theater itself! To walk from the street to the gaily lighted ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... Pope at first, or that so novel a method as that which I have described, whereby the faith and discipline of Christendom were settled by negotiations between sovereigns, came suddenly into existence. In its first sessions the Council, to quote the Pope's own words, resembled the Tower of Babel rather than a Synod of Fathers. The Spanish prelates contended fiercely for two principles touching the episcopacy: one was that the residence of bishops in their dioceses had been divinely commanded; ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... region, Teufelsdrockh hastens from the Tower of Babel, to follow the dispersion of Mankind over the whole habitable and habilable globe. Walking by the light of Oriental, Pelasgic, Scandinavian, Egyptian, Otaheitean, Ancient and Modern researches of every conceivable kind, ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... our Gospel Refuge. "Neither is there salvation in any other." Rejecting Jesus, we are lost for ever. All other refuges, however good or great or strong they may appear to be, will prove only Babel-towers, that will fall on the poor builders, and crush them in ...
— The Cities of Refuge: or, The Name of Jesus - A Sunday book for the young • John Ross Macduff
... 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, ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... and days spent in the ardent battle of Wall Street. Frenzy of speculations in land, cities undertaken and built by sheer force of millions, trains launched at full speed over bridges built on a Babel-like sweep of arch, the creaking of cable cars, the quivering of electric cars, sliding along their wires with a crackle and a spark, the dizzy ascent of elevators, in buildings twenty stories high, immense ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... must be in that country where all the bird-life of the world was born, for wherever there was water, in the pools and little streams and the hollows between the ridges, the voice of it in the morning was a babel of sound. Out of the sweet breast of the earth he could feel the irresistible pulse of motherhood filling him with its strength and its courage, and whispering to him its everlasting message that because of the glory and need and faith of life had God created this land of twenty-hour day ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... and besides, it would be better to have the story from some one who could tell things more clearly. Down I flew to find Tony, whom I could trust to have commandeered some news for me by this time. Already the drawing-room was crammed with perfumed people and too fragrant flowers, and a babel of chatter. I should have had to knock fat old ladies and thin old gentlemen about like ninepins to sort out from among bonneted and bald pates the inconspicuous brown head I sought, and my search was checked constantly by well-meaning creatures ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... puzzled at one another—as such people occasionally are. They were as two persons, both intelligent and interested, entirely divided by the absence of any common language, or even of symbols. Words that each used meant different things to the other. (It strikes me sometimes that the curse of Babel was a deeper thing than ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... Shem said one to another at Babel,—"Go to, let us build us a city and a tower whose top shall reach unto heaven," they typified a remarkable trait of the human mind,—a desire for a tangible and material exponent of itself in its most heroic moods. In the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... carry the analogy further by stating that as Babel was the cause of the destruction of the Jewish people, so this disaster had its beginning with Cain and his offspring, who settled in that part of the earth where, at a later day, Babylon was founded. These are ...
— Commentary on Genesis, Vol. II - Luther on Sin and the Flood • Martin Luther
... of the poor and the luxurious, pleasure-filled lives of the rich. Between the ignorant criminal classes and the educated and innocent. You may make 'em strong as the Pyramaids and high as the tower of Babel, but the passions and weaknesses of humanity will scale 'em and ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... voices of the fugue in Mozart's overture to "The Magic Flute." Three hundred years ago Orazio Vecchi composed a burlesque madrigal in the severe style of that day, in which he tried to depict the babel of sounds in a synagogue. Obviously the musical Jew is supposed to be allied to the stage Jew and to be fit food for the humorist. Strauss's music gives a new reading to Wilde; it is a caricature in which cacophony reigns supreme under the guise ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... is still innocent. But what does that matter nowadays! It is the age of the masses: they lie on their belly before everything that is massive. And so also in politicis. A statesman who rears up for them a new Tower of Babel, some monstrosity of empire and power, they call 'great'—what does it matter that we more prudent and conservative ones do not meanwhile give up the old belief that it is only the great thought that gives greatness to ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... was very seldom—to wound the pride of the English soldiery, used to say significantly, in that jargon by which the various nations in the Crimea endeavoured to obviate the consequences of what occurred at the Tower of Babel, some time ago, "Malakhoff bono—Redan no bono." And this, of course, usually led to recriminatory statements, and history was ransacked to find something consolatory to English pride. Once I noticed a brawny man, of the Army Works Corps, bringing a ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... A babel of voices died away as the two men walked into a room rather smaller than that below and furnished with little tables, cafe fashion. At one end was a grand piano and a platform before which a velvet curtain was draped. Some twenty people, men and women, were in the place, ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... upon the room with palpable suddenness—like a blinding flash, numbing for a moment the senses of all who had been taken by surprise. The reflex of the shock was manifested in a very babel of incoherent shouts, jostlings and stumblings and sharp collisions with ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie
... The babel went on as one after another fought for the spoil. They had forgotten him, and those at the back of the crowd had found a new diversion in hustling old Biscoe as he struggled to get away with his two cutlets of ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... silent too. The sweet voices of pleading affections, the loud cry of desires and instincts that roar for their food like beasts of prey, the querulous complaints of disappointed hopes, the groans and sobs of black-robed sorrows, the loud hubbub and Babel, like the noise of a great city, that every man carries within, must be stifled and coerced into silence. We have to take the animal in us by the throat, and sternly say, 'Lie down there and be quiet.' We have to silence tastes and ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... generations have been, to fight and believe without an inkling of the cause. The past lies before us; the history of everything is published. Every one records his opinion, and loudly proclaims what he wants. In this Babel of ideals few demands are ever literally satisfied; but many evaporate, merge together, and reach an unintended issue, with which they are content. The whole drift of things presents a huge, good-natured comedy to the observer. It stirs not unpleasantly a certain ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... they please, and give what names to them they will; yet, if they will be understood WHEN THEY SPEAK OF THINGS REALLY EXISTING, they must in some degree conform their ideas to the things they would speak of; or else men's language will be like that of Babel; and every man's words, being intelligible only to himself, would no longer serve to conversation and the ordinary affairs of life, if the ideas they stand for be not some way answering the common appearances and agreement of substances ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume II. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books III. and IV. (of 4) • John Locke
... specifically Darwinian phase of evolutionistic thought, as laid down in Spencer's interminable volumes, for instance, is given up by reputable biologists the world over. There is pretty much of a Babel among them, when it comes to a definition of evolution. There are dozens of theories,—mutation, orthogenesis, Weismanism, Mendelianism, etc.,— and each has its adherents,—but they agree in one thing, that "Natural Selection" does not account ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... A perfect Babel arose suddenly from the kitchen. In the midst of the turmoil I seemed to discern Berry's fat laugh. The next second a large key hurtled ...
— The Brother of Daphne • Dornford Yates
... from mountain to mountain and from the hills to the plains and valleys beneath, through the vast extent of our Northern States. But believe me, when I tell you, their attempts will be as utterly fruitless as were the efforts of the builders of Babel; and why? Because moral, like natural light, is so extremely subtle in its nature as to overleap all human barriers, and laugh at the puny efforts of man to control it. All the excuses and palliations of this system must inevitably be swept away, just as other "refuges of lies" have been, ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... a fleet of them, and to every little water-cottage a canoe is tethered, for errands and visits. At all hours of the day and night processions of boats pass to and from the palace, and everywhere bustling traders and agents ply their dingy little craft, and proclaim their several callings in a Babel of cries. ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... the size of every family was decided in heaven. More modern views would not have startled her; they would simply have seemed foolish—thin chatter, like the boasts of the men who built the tower of Babel, or like Axel's plan to breed ostriches in the chicken yard. From what evidence Mrs. Kronborg formed her opinions on this and other matters, it would have been difficult to say, but once formed, they were unchangeable. She would no more have questioned her convictions than she would have ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... will in this country, there is a Babel of tongues. In this instance our special coachman was a Bohemian, speaking his own language—a very different dialect from the Slovacks who were the "beaters" for our hunt. The gamekeepers, or rather the foresters ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... humanity, 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, the siren still sent up its yells for succour, and some brave ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... time she was set at liberty. Fair and sweet and delicate in her fresh array she walked down the corridor in the centre of an exultant crowd of friends. In listening to the babel of chatter and laughter, she forgot utterly her companion in imprisonment. Just once she happened to look back from the entangling arms of Bea and Berta and Robbie Belle, and caught sight of a forlorn little figure staring after her from the shadows of the infirmary ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... turned out correct; he was already some distance off when he heard the call of the sentry to the quarter-guard, followed almost immediately by a still louder shout, that told that he had discovered the flight of the prisoners; then came the sound of a musket shot, a drum beat the alarm, and a babel of sounds rang on the still air. But by this time Ned was halfway to the clump of trees, and three minutes later he was in his father's arms. There was no time to talk then. Another coat was hurried on to him, an ammunition belt and pouch thrown over his ...
— In Times of Peril • G. A. Henty
... these toys we sluggards use, But follow arms, and wait on barbarous wars. Young men, young boys, beware of schoolmasters; They will infect you, mar you, blear your eyes: They seek to lay the curse of God on you, Namely, confusion of languages, Wherewith those that the Tower of Babel built Accursed were in the world's infancy. Latin, it was the speech of infidels; Logic hath nought to say in a true cause; Philosophy is curiosity; And Socrates was therefore put to death, Only for he was a ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... 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 ...
— Confessio Amantis - Tales of the Seven Deadly Sins, 1330-1408 A.D. • John Gower
... and lone, and wild; and there I saw the manufacturer's day-dreams embodied in substantial stone and brick and ashes—the cinder-black highway, the cottages, and the cottage gardens; there I saw a mighty mill, and a chimney ambitious as the tower of Babel. I told my old housekeeper when I came home ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... din and babel as the "afflicted" kept up! By the curious power of sympathy it affected the crowd almost to madness. If Dulcibel looked at them, they cried she was tormenting them. If she looked upward in resignation to ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... bought the first volume of Manchester, but could not read it; it was much too learned for me, and seemed rather an account of Babel than Manchester, I mean in point of ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... United States. As regarded educational advantages, the institution was unexceptionable; the professors were considered unsurpassed in their several departments, and every provision was made for thorough tuition. But what a Babel reigned outside of the recitation room! One hundred and forty girls to spend their recesses in envy, ridicule, malice, and detraction. Anxious to shake off the loneliness which so heavily oppressed her, Irene at first mingled freely among her companions; but she soon became disgusted with ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... but take it up only rarely." Lenz, who did not know the barcarolle, thereupon went to a music-shop and read it through attentively. The piece, however, did not please him at all; it seemed to him a long movement in the nocturne-style, a Babel of figuration on a lightly-laid foundation. But he found that he had made a mistake, and, after hearing it played by Tausig, confessed that the virtuoso had infused into the "nine pages of enervating music, of one and the same long-breathed ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... 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 destruction, ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... be imagined that Amelie's scandalous declaration let loose Babel once again in the office of the unhappy Commissary. Mrs. Dane-Vereker, Turpin, Amelie, and Mr. Withershaw vociferated simultaneously and with prolonged fervour. The patience of M. Lesueur came ...
— The Tale Of Mr. Peter Brown - Chelsea Justice - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • V. Sackville West
... fair, Berbera is a perfect Babel, in confusion as in languages: no chief is acknowledged, and the customs of bygone days are the laws of the place. Disputes between the inland tribes daily arise, and are settled by the spear and dagger, the combatants retiring to the beach ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... Armenian is content to be endured and protected. Meanwhile he is not without a sort of national ambition; but it is of a new kind for him. They believe themselves to be the most ancient of people, retaining the original language that was spoken before the dispersion of Babel, and by consequence the identical language that was spoken by Adam. An interesting excursion might be made on this subject, seemingly so far at variance with the conclusions of learned ethnographers. Their deductions ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... filled with the hope that their united endeavours to save her fallen sister would be blessed with success. But when they came in sight of the papal towers and gorgeous edifices of St Andrews, which then raised their proud heads, like Babel, so audaciously to the heavens, they ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... his classic lids Or mould' true beauty with artistic hands, Thou reared upon thy plains the lofty pyramids, With sphinx and obelisks 'decked thy burning sands. Aye! Queen, thou then wast hailed in all the lands Long ere vain Babel 'fused the human tongue In dialects rude of wild barbaric bands; Thou soared to Wisdom's realm, her sceptre wrung, And reigned the wisest queen the nations ...
— The Sylvan Cabin - A Centenary Ode on the Birth of Lincoln and Other Verse • Edward Smyth Jones
... 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 breathed with ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... 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 ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... performance. Everybody sang as loud as he could bawl; cheeks and elbows were at their utmost efforts, the bassoon vying with the clarionet, the goose-stop of the clarionet with the bassoon—it was Babel with the addition of the beasts. And they were all so proud of their performance. It was the only part of the service during which no one could sleep, said one of them with pride—and he was right. No one could sleep through ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... babel had subsided now. Hucksters left their wares, and bookmakers their stools, to watch the struggle. Every eye was intent on the moving figures of man and dog and three sheep over ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... 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 far, we shall learn with the greatest ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... and less than five minutes later the shadow of a man was seen upon one of the red blinds. In the street below the people surged forward: there was a running flash of white as their heads were thrown back and their faces upturned to the Hall; and the shouts and cries swelled to a Babel, tearing the air. The blind was withdrawn, the window thrown open: Clarice could see people pressing forward in the room. They looked in the glare of yellow light like black ninepins. A gleam of bright scarlet shot out from amongst them, and the Mayor stepped on to the balcony ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... possible; an apple knocked from a child's hand was once the signal for something like a war; and even when I was there, a gunboat lay in the bay to assist the authorities. To contrary interests, it should be observed, the curse of Babel is here added; the Lews men are Gaelic speakers, those of Caithness have adopted English; an odd circumstance, if you reflect that both must be largely Norsemen by descent. I remember seeing one of the strongest instances of this division: a thing like a Punch-and-Judy ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... still there; the Casino was full of people, the shops were doing an active trade; the restaurants were crowded with English, Americans, Belgians taking tea, chocolate, or liqueurs at little tables and creating a babel of talk. Newspapers were being sold everywhere by ragamuffin boys who shouted their head-lines in French, Flemish, and quite understandable English. A fort or two at Liege had fallen, but it was of no consequence. ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... Bresciani observes, was more graceful to the eye, more easy of construction, more durable, and, perhaps, connected with some mysterious ideas of Eternity, or the circling course of the heavenly bodies. Such was the form of the first great building on record, the Tower of Babel, as we have it represented; the type in many respects of the Sarde Nuraghe. Nor is it an unreasonable conjecture that the alien people, mysteriously alluded to in Genesis, as mixing with the children ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... A Babel of eager voices arose then, but Mr. Smith was not listening now. He was watching Mr. Jim's face, and ...
— Oh, Money! Money! • Eleanor Hodgman Porter
... began to appear from behind the ridges. First by twos and threes, then by sixes and dozens, from north and south and east and west the black figures came cantering towards us, until our little party was surrounded by, I suppose, three or four hundred mounted men. The babel of talk was deafening; everyone had something to say about the fight of yesterday; and in addition to that it was easily apparent that merely as Englishmen we were objects of absorbing interest to these pastoral Free Staters. I know that my tobacco-pouch was empty in about ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... 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 God." Thus only is its meaning obvious, and consistent with the worship of the lingam ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... archaic hexameter verse of the stories of Genesis and Exodus, and of Messianic prophecies in the guise of Sibylline oracles. The Sibyl, whom the superstitions of the time revered as an inspired seeress of prehistoric ages, was made to recite the building of the tower of Babel, or the virtues of Abraham, and again to prophesy the day when the heathen nations should be wiped out, and the God of Israel be the God of all the world. Although the fabrication of oracles is not entirely defensible, ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... while the yacht rounded sharply to, and in a twinkling was tossing head to sea with loud claps of her canvas and passionate jerks of her boom, as the wind leapt on its quarry, now turning to hay, with redoubled force. The sting of spray in my eyes and the Babel of noise dazed me; but Davies, with a pull on the fore-sheet, soothed the tormented little ship, and left her coolly sparring with the waves while he shortened sail and puffed his pipe. An hour ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... the babel came nearer with a swiftness which spoke much for the speed of the shouters. Only Randalin's little red shoe began to tap the earth impatiently. What did it matter ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... centre that the ear ceased to be affected by them—being suddenly shut off, the silence which came in their place was startling to the sense. The voices of the striking employees, who retained possession of the Union Passenger Depot, resounded strangely through the vast building, which was usually a babel of ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... and parcel of that horrible deep-red-plush nuisance, the Hotel-omnibus. He and it are inseparables, and make up a sort of Centaur between them. Once outside the Railway-station, I am besieged by a babel of these Porter-omnibuses—"Bear Hotel, Sor;" "Grand Hotel, Sor!"—This, from a very dilapidated specimen, which, on inspection, turns out to be "Grand Hotel Du Lac;" a pirate porter-omnibus in fact; at last I find The Grand Hotel ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 17, 1892 • Various
... is so wise and good, Living like some angelic visitant, Dismay'd not from his purpose and great aim By all the fierce and angry discord round. So one in sober mood and pale high thought Stands in a door-way, whence he sees within The riot warm of wassailing, and hears All the dwarf Babel of their common talk, As each small drunken mind floats to the top And general surface of the senseless din; Whilst every tuneless knave doth rend the soul Of harmony, the more he hath refus'd To sing; ere Bacchus set him by the ears With common sense, ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... the Cathedral tolled mournfully as the old year died. Would that its bitter memories could have perished with it! And then from steeple and steamship, locomotive and factory, a babel of sound burst forth as sirens and bells and whistles welcomed the birth of 1900. Yet, as the shrill greetings died away, one heard the tramp of infantry through the streets. The Capetown Highlanders—a volunteer battalion—were under arms all that night, ...
— With Methuen's Column on an Ambulance Train • Ernest N. Bennett
... faintly discernible even yesterday, had become very marked by this time. The smell of fire was in the air, although as yet the terrible roaring of the flames, of which all men who had been near it were speaking, had not yet become audible in the Babel of talk going on in the streets and about the great church. The dean and canons were grouped about the precincts, looking anxiously into each other's faces, as though to seek to read encouragement from one another. ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green |
