"Serried" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... yonder heaven deep the stars are lit For evening service of seraphic quires— Eternal pomp of serried, blazing worlds, The heraldry of God, ere yet Time was. The moon hangs low, her golden orb impearl'd In a sweet iris of delicious light, That leaves the eye in doubt, as swelling die Round trills of music ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... and gave the rein to his barb. It bounded forward, and cleared the gloomy arch of the portals, and Boabdil el Chico was the first Moor who issued from Granada, to that last and eventful field. Out, then, poured, as a river that rushes from caverns into day, the burnished and serried files of the Moorish cavalry. Muza came the last, closing the array. Upon his dark and stern countenance there spoke not the ardent enthusiasm of the sanguine king. It was locked and rigid; and the anxieties ...
— Leila or, The Siege of Granada, Book V. • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... British army has held its ground against the overwhelming power of Napoleon's magnificent cavalry. Raw recruits some of them, against the veterans of Jena and of Wagram! But they have been ordered to hold the place to the last man, and in close and serried squares they have held their ground ever since half-past eleven this morning, while one after another the flower of Napoleon's world-famed cavalry had been hurled ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... that bulked in the center of the great chamber, I glanced around the hall, at the thousand-foot circle of seated prolats. Two hundred men and women were there; two hundred more were sleeping in the dormitories. These were all that were left of the world's workers. Before each operative rose the serried hundreds of pearl buttons, dim lit, clicking in and out under the busy fingers. Above each, an oval visor-screen with its flitting images brought across space the area the switches controlled. Every one of the ten score was watching his screen with taut attention, ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... Trueman reached The Holms, after a long and weary ride from the western end of his circuit, which reached nearly to the head of Lake Ontario. The forest was gorgeous in its autumnal foliage, like Joseph in his coat of many colours. The corn still stood thick, in serried ranks, in the fields, no longer plumed and tasseled like an Indian chief, but rustling, weird-like, as an army of spectres in the gathering gloom. The great yellow pumpkins gleamed like huge nuggets of gold in some forest Eldorado. The crimson patches of ripened buckwheat looked ...
— Neville Trueman the Pioneer Preacher • William Henry Withrow
... Fructidor two years earlier. Some of the Directors were put under constraint; others supported the conspiracy. But the Council of Five Hundred resisted strenuously, and it was only after scenes of great violence that it succumbed. It was only at the tap of the army drums and at the flash of serried bayonets, that the last assembly of the Revolution abandoned its post. The man of the sword, so long foreseen and dreaded by Robespierre, had come into his own, and the Republic had made ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... of color; the trees burned red and yellow, glowing torches of autumn, and accentuating all their ephemeral and regal splendor; among them, yet never of them, were the green austere pines marching in their serried ranks, on, on up the hillsides to ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... AEmilius Paullus completely changed the aspect of affairs. Perseus was driven from a strong position which he had taken up on the banks of the Enipeus, forced to retreat to Pydna, and, finally, to accept an engagement near that town. At first the serried ranks of the phalanx seemed to promise superiority; but its order having been broken by the inequalities of the ground, the Roman legionaries penetrated the disordered mass, and committed fearful carnage, to the extent, it is said, of 20,000 men. Perseus fled first ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... forces. Bonaparte, the young general of the French Republic, who, in the course of one year (1796), had won as many battles and as much glory as many a great and illustrious warrior during the whole course of an eventful life—Bonaparte had crossed the Italian Alps with the serried columns of his army, and the most trusted military leaders of Austria were fleeing before him in dismay. The hero of Lodi and Arcole had won new victories, and these victories constantly diminished the distance between his army and the menaced ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... through the lofty, dark, and closely serried trees, which vibrated like chords under the soft bow of the wind. Now and again he would look down passages between the trees—narrow pillared corridors, dusky as if webbed across with mist. All round was a twilight, thickly populous with ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... unsatisfactory young man—and so, no doubt, he is. Belonging to the comfortable ninety, they felt, in fact, the need of slinging names at one who obviously was of the ten. Others of its critics, belonging to the ten, wielded their epithets upon Antonia, and the serried ranks behind her, and called them Pharisees; as dull as ditch-water—and ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... "Rupel Pass." Instantly I recalled how a British General, over on the Struma a few days previously, had pointed out to me a steep range of serried snow-capped mountains towering against the skyline to the northwest, and told me that the feat of the Greeks in taking a division over it at a point where even the wary Bulgar had deemed it impossible was one of the finest exploits in the ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... troop of youths began to feel acute anxiety and alarm. From her high post of observation Melissa could see that, although the appearance of Zminis on the scene had caused a fever of agitation, they now broke their serried squares, wandered about as if undecided what to do, but prepared for the worst, and turned their curly heads now to this side and now to that, till the trumpetblast from the seats attracted every eye upward, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... and the bonnets—all were ranged in chronological order, dated and complete. A great cupboard was devoted to the dolls; in the china room at Windsor a special table held the mugs of her childhood, and her children's mugs as well. Mementoes of the past surrounded her in serried accumulations. In every room the tables were powdered thick with the photographs of relatives; their portraits, revealing them at all ages, covered the walls; their figures, in solid marble, rose up from pedestals, or gleamed from brackets in ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... far to the west, lies a great plain, liquid with distance as though it were a sea of gold. From its nearer edge, the land comes leaping up in wide smooth waves of serried pines, to the meadow. There the pines stop abruptly, in the leaning immobility of a man who has almost trodden upon a flower. From their feet the meadow spreads, fresh and lush, susurrant with the hidden ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... radiant, dark faces gleamed in the sunshine, where they stood in serried ranks, picturesque in all the brilliant coloring that their rustic wardrobes held in store for these days of festa; silken shawls that were heirlooms—strings of coral and amber and great Venetian ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... peacefully as in infancy he slept upon his mother's breast, indifferent alike in death as in life to the human ghouls who pursued him. Never again will his splendid intellect drive a pen. "In thoughts that breathe and words that burn" against the serried ranks of injustice and of wrong. Others will follow in his footsteps, and battle as faithfully as he for the cause of right, but, alas, none are clad like him in the Milan mail of intellectuality, against which the cloth-yard shafts of foes could rattle but could never pierce. Now, that for him ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... they burst through our lines, and forced a path for themselves up to the principal legion of the reserve, which was stationed in the centre, in a position called the praetorian camp; and there the soldiery, being in closer array, and in densely serried ranks, stood firm as so many towers, and renewed the battle with increased spirit. And intent upon parrying the blows of the enemy, and covering themselves with their shields as the Mirmillos[68] do, with their drawn swords wounded ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... from the American rifles. A blasting torrent of death poured from the machine guns. The heavy field artillery, that had the range to a dot, tore gaping holes in the serried German ranks. Great lanes opened up in the advancing hosts. The target was broad and there was no need to take aim, for every bullet was bound to ...
— Army Boys on the Firing Line - or, Holding Back the German Drive • Homer Randall
... analogy in the present day to that claim of internal jurisdiction for which the Church struggled so gallantly in the middle ages. No one who sees the serried ranks with which she encounters all investigation from without would imagine the severity with which she administers justice within. Like the Westphalian Vehm-gericht, the mystery of feminine courts is only equalled by ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... sofa hung a large print of the Circus Maximus, with crowded tiers mounting toward the sky, and awninged boxes where sat the Vestal Virgins and the Emperor high above a motley, serried group on the sand. At the mouth of a tunnel a lion stood motionless, menacing, regarding them. The ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... her cheeks; her hair showed the hue of the corn which, not a mile away, our people were reaping afield. From where we were, she and I, one could hear the rattle of the machine as it swept down the tall and serried wheat. It was the top of noon when I found her; the sun high in heaven, but so fierce in his power that you saw him through a mist of his own making, and the sky all about him white as a sea-fog. The Oread's body was sanguine brown, only her breast, which I saw half-revealed through a slit ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... and Queller of Tyrants was caricatured as Mrs. Facing-both-ways; and the great commonwealth that even Mr. Lodge's statistics cannot displace from her leadership in the history of the country was charged with trading on her neutrality. Her solemn protest was unheeded. The "serried phalanx of her gallant sons" that should "prevent the passage of the United States forces" was an expression that amused Northern critics of style as a bit of antiquated Southern rodomontade. But the call for troops showed that the rodomontade ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve
... the serried ranks rode one man alone,—a square figure, wrapped in a cloak of deeper and richer purple than any worn by the ordinary nobles, sitting like a rock upon a great white horse. As he came up, Zoroaster and his fourscore men ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford
... garden. Uncertain weather had left the grass wet, and she had carried her work-table into the shelter of a small summer-house, whence the whole plain, drawn in purple and blue on the pale grounding of its chalk soil, could be seen—east, west, and north. Serried ranks, line above line, of purplish cloud girded the horizon, each circle of the great amphitheater rising from its shadowy foundations into pearly white and shining gray, while the topmost series of all soared in snowy majesty upon a sea of blue, above the far-spread woods and fields. ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... fully a month. There was only the cuckoo clock, a huge one, with a dial illuminated with crimson flowers, that looked clean and bright, ticking sonorously all the while. But what especially frightened her were some sketches in oils that hung frameless from the walls, a serried array of sketches reaching to the floor, where they mingled with heaps of canvases thrown about anyhow. She had never seen such terrible painting, so coarse, so glaring, showing a violence of colour, that jarred upon her nerves like a carter's ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... showed the pinnacle of an iceberg piercing a polar winter sky: a muster of northern lights reared their dim lances, close serried, along the horizon. Throwing these into distance, rose, in the foreground, a head,—a colossal head, inclined towards the iceberg, and resting against it. Two thin hands, joined under the forehead, and ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... standing and moving as mere chance may determine. It is even certain that they had advanced beyond the second period, when the phalanx order of battle is adopted, the confused mass being replaced by a single serried body presenting its best armed troops to the enemy, and keeping in the rear, to add their weight to the charge, the weaker and more imperfectly protected. It was not really left for Cyaxares the Mede to be the first to organize an Asiatic army—to divide the troops into companies ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... the border, and he hastened to the rescue at once, himself at the head of his own body-guard, and his son with such troopers as were ready to hand, leaving word for others to follow with all despatch. But when they were in sight of the Assyrians, and saw their serried ranks, horse and foot, drawn up in order, compact and motionless, they came to a halt themselves. [19] Now Cyrus, seeing that all the rest of the world was off to the rescue, boot and saddle, must needs ride out too, and so put on his armour for the first time, and could scarcely believe ...
— Cyropaedia - The Education Of Cyrus • Xenophon
... the Border with a great army of perhaps 40,000 men, met the spearmen of Wallace in their serried phalanxes at Falkirk, broke the "schiltrom" or clump of spears by the arrows of his archers; slaughtered the archers of Ettrick Forest; scattered the mounted nobles, and avenged the rout of Stirling (July 22, 1298). The country remained ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... had to fight alone.[74] Ten thousand citizens armed as hoplites camped before the Persians. The Athenians had ten generals, having the command on successive days; of these Miltiades, when his turn came, drew up the army for battle. The Athenians charged the enemy in serried ranks, but the Persians seeing them advancing without cavalry and without archers, thought them fools. It was the first time that the Greeks had dared to face the Persians in battle array. The Athenians began by turning both flanks, and then engaged the centre, driving the Persians ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... and entered the huge shanty, and stood apologetically near the door. The contrast between the open street and the enclosed stuffiness of the dim and crowded interior was overwhelming. Hundreds of ragged and shabby men sat in serried rows, leaning forward with elbows out and heads protruding as they listened to a speech from the gimcrack stage. They seemed to be waiting to spring, like famished and ferocious tigers. Interrupting, they growled, snarled, yapped, and swore with appalling sincerity. Imprecations ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... in strange sort upon me. I felt then as I had felt a year ago in England—on a night when the aurora borealis was streaming and sweeping round heaven, when, belated in lonely fields, I had paused to watch that mustering of an army with banners—that quivering of serried lances— that swift ascent of messengers from below the north star to the dark, high keystone of heaven's arch. I felt, not happy, far otherwise, but strong with ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... thermometer was 32 degrees, with a powerful sun shining, and it fell to 28 degrees at 4 p.m., when the north wind set in. At sunset the moon rose through angry masses of woolly cirrus; its broad full orb threw a flood of yellow light over the serried tops south of Pundim; thence advancing obliquely towards Nursing, "it stood tip-toe" for a few minutes on that beautiful pyramid of snow, whence it seemed to take flight and mount majestically into mid-air, illuminating Kinchin, Pundim, ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... both armies were cheerful then and the flowery garlands and perfumes of both troops emitted equal fragrance. And, O bull of Bharata's race, fierce was the collision that took place when the serried ranks arrayed for battle encountered each other. And the sound of musical instruments, mingled with the blare of conches and the noise of drums, and the shouts of brave warriors roaring fiercely at one another, became very loud. O bull of Bharata's ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... stranger can contemplate. As there are no pews, each person, on entering, helps himself or herself to a chair, which he holds aloft over the heads of his already seated neighbors, as he slowly forces his way onward through their serried ranks, until he espies some unappropriated gap into which he can insinuate his chair and himself; the police and the beadles always taking care to keep a little pathway, just large enough to squeeze through, open all through the outer aisle that runs round the church. For the unfortunate ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... nothing is known, and they will not even answer any more questions, for they are exasperated by the procession of people ringing the bell. A squad of carabinieri comes upon the scene, and charges down Via Galvani in serried ranks. Hisses are heard, and angry cries: "They know! They took him away!" "No" shouts a woman who sells fruit, and who was one of a group on the corner of Via Alessandro Volta. "It was a delegato! It was the police!" The members of that group are less enraged with the delegato and ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... and so they formed their men into squares, with a wall of bristling spears on every side. Upon this solid mass of men the Swiss could make no impression. In vain they charged with the fiery courage which had so often gained them the victory; they could find no vulnerable point in the serried columns, and it seemed that the brave mountaineers must all perish, and leave their homes again to the mercy of the Austrian soldiers. But, when almost in despair, the tide of battle was turned by the acts of a single Swiss soldier, Arnold Winkelried, of Unterwalden. ...
— Ten Great Events in History • James Johonnot
... once more and waiting) Well, I will go—perchance To march and scatter them with serried lance. Perchance to take thy plan.... I know not yet. [Exit PENTHEUS ...
— Hippolytus/The Bacchae • Euripides
... towards the west. The fields, too, were black with men, engineers, weighted down with their heavy equipments, resting in long double rows, eyes vacant, heads bent. Above the thickets of rifles sweeping past, mounted officers sat in their saddles, as though carried along on the surface of the serried tide. Standards fringed with gold slanted in the last rays of the sun, sabres glimmered, curving upward from the thronged rifles, and over all sounded the shuffle, shuffle of worn shoes in the dust, a mournful, monotonous cadence, a hopeless measure, whose burden was ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... which the tombstones had been temporarily removed, engaged, not with mattock and death's head, but with spirit-level and measuring-cord. They were levelling a stretch of newly-turned and smoothed ground, and they pointed with pride to the portion of the work already accomplished, serried rows of spick-and-span headstones, all "plumb," as they explained, and freshly scraped—not a sign of caressing moss or a tendril of vine to be seen. A neat job, if there ever was one. We should have seen the yard ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... store his printed treasures. Books were everywhere. Below the windows the recesses were filled out with crowded shelves; the door of a closet, left ajar, showed that the place was packed with books, roughly or cheaply clad, and pamphlets. At the bottom of the cases, books stretched in serried files along the floor. Some had crept up upon the library-steps, as if, impatient to rejoin their companions, they were mounting to the shelves of their own accord. They invaded all accessible nooks and crannies ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... stream and reached the field gate which leads to the lower meadows. There before me lay spring's pageant; green pennons waving, dainty maids curtseying, and a host of joyous yellow trumpeters proclaiming 'Victory' to an awakened earth. They range in serried ranks right down to the river, so that a man must walk warily to reach the water's edge where they stand gazing down at themselves in fairest semblance like their most tragic progenitor, and, rising from the bright grass in their thousands, ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... questions that were both of extreme complexity in themselves, and also involved collision with trade interests always easily alarmed, irritated, and even exasperated. With merchants and manufacturers, importers and exporters, brokers and bankers, with all the serried hosts of British trade, with the laws and circumstances of international commerce, he was every day brought into close, detailed, and responsible contact:—Whether the duty on straw bonnets should go by weight or by number; what was the ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... to the Cities; and even had he met his bane: well were that! And, as young folk will, he set to work making a picture of his deeds there, had he been there. He showed himself the stricken fight in the plain, and the press, and the struggle, and the breaking of the serried band, and himself amidst the ring of foemen doing most valiantly, and falling there at last, his shield o'er-heavy with the weight of foemen's spears for a man to uphold it. Then the victory of his folk and the lamentation and praise over the slain man of the Mountain Dales, and the burial of the ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... above all is the changing sky, where the clear blue gives way to a billowy expanse of white rolling clouds or dark rain-laden masses, which pour into the upper clefts of the ravine, and blot out the serried ranks of the pines, until a thorough drenching seems inevitable—when lo! a glint of blue through the gloomy background, ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... repented, possibly atoned them. Sins of omission so veiled amidst our hourly emotions, blent, confused, unseen, in the conventional routine of existence,—alas! could these suddenly emerge from their shadow, group together in serried mass and accusing order,—alas, alas! would not the best of us then start in dismay, and would not the proudest humble himself ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of the last century, when Erskine was little more than an academy, it was often called "the little green school at Centerport." It is not so little now, but it's greener than ever. Wide-spreading elms grow everywhere; in serried ranks within the college grounds, in smaller detachments throughout the village, in picket lines along the river and out into the country. The grass grows lush wherever it can gain hold, and, not content with having its own way on green and campus, is forever attempting ...
— Behind the Line • Ralph Henry Barbour
... houses, which seem dropped rather than built, crowd the valley and its rocky ledges; a rapid rivulet dances in and out among the dwellings, till its voice is lost in the waters of a tidal haven, thronged with fishing boats and guarded by its Peak of serried rock." ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... along the serried shelves of books, and a new light came into them. In these dusty tomes themselves were hidden the keys of power; he had but to seize them and the secrets of the mighty past would be revealed to him, to him alone. Armed with these ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... up? Then, it was not such a bad way with the Nation. The Nation would be the better for this fight. Certain, it was, the better side would win. Would it be the few like the sugar pine towering over its fellows; or the many like the lodge pole pine and englemann spruce standing in serried ranks of ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... a brief skirmish; then as usual, Mac conquered, and Gifford Barrett was led, an unwilling victim, to the awning where sat Mac's mother, beyond her a serried rank of Mac's relatives and, beyond them all, a tall girl in a black suit who watched ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... trembling. He is with difficulty persuaded to enter the accursed place. When introduced to the saloons—delusively called de conversation, he begins by staring fixedly at the chandeliers, the ormolu clocks, and the rich draperies, and resolutely averts his eyes from the serried ranks of punters or players, and the Pactolus, whose sands are circulating on the green cloth on the table. Then he thinks there is no very great harm in looking on, and so peeps over the shoulder of a moustached gamester, who perhaps ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... before me, making obeisance to me by bending their bony knees, because, as I quite understood, I was the only human being that had ever escaped from Jana. Moreover, on the foremost elephant's skull Hans was perched like a mahout, giving words of command, to their serried ranks and explaining to them that it would be very convenient if they would carry their tusks, for which they had no further use, and pile them in a certain place—I forget where—that must be near a good road to facilitate their subsequent transport to a land where they would be made ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... silent hurry and activity passed away, and at last the whole army was in motion. It was now three o'clock; the moon shone down upon the serried ranks, gleaming from bayonet and cannon, and stretching long black shadows athwart the road. From time to time along the column could be heard the ringing voice of some commander, as he galloped to the van, cheering his men with some well-timed allusion, or dispelling the surrounding ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood
... from the Great Place to the Tugela in state and dignity such as became a thing divine, perhaps the first white woman, moreover, who had ever entered Zululand. All day she rode alone, Tamboosa leading the white ox before her and Richard following behind, while in front and to the rear marched the serried ranks of the impi, her escort. At night, as before, she slept alone in the empty kraals provided for her, attended by the best-born maidens, Richard being lodged in ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... dread, he began to read the thick-serried columns of newspaper advertisement, Wanted! Wanted! Wanted! Wants by the thousand; but many more those of the would-be employed than those of the would-be employers, and under the second heading not one in a hundred that offered him the slightest hint or hope. Wanted! ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... three bearers was waiting for me in the morning, so that I left the town of Laowatan in a manner befitting my rank. The town had risen to see me leave, and I went down the street amid serried ranks of spectators. We crossed the river by a wonderful suspension bridge, 250 feet long and 12 feet broad, formed of linked bars of wrought iron. It shows stability, strength, and delicacy of design, and is a remarkable work to have been done by the untutored barbarians of this land ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... At a first glance this force was most imposing; the coup d'oeil was really magnificent; they looked like what I should imagine a body of Comanche Indians would appear when ranged in battle line. The men were closely packed in serried ranks, and it was evident they formed a drilled and perfectly organised force. Immediate action became imminent, and as most fortunately they had thought to find us seated at supper, and to spear us as we sat in a body together, we ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... cool and laden with sweetness. We came, however, to a pretty lane, where those of our escort who were in front stopped, and those who were behind rode up and begged us to keep close together, as for many leagues the country was haunted by robbers. Guns and pistols being looked to, we rode on in serried ranks, expecting every moment to hear a bullet ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... light sting of the wind, as it passed through her draperies. As this group in the procession moved slowly along, the city took on a curiously antique aspect. In every lattice window a head was framed. The lines of the townspeople pressed closer and closer; they made a serried mass of blouses and caps, of shiny coats and bared heads. The very houses seemed to recognize that a part of their own youth was passing them by; these were the figures they had looked out upon, time after time, in the old fourteenth ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... of giving him a report of his Volksblatt. We were interrupted by an imposing troop of well-armed young students of the gymnasium who had just entered the city and wished to have a safe conduct to their place of muster. The sight of these serried ranks of youthful figures, numbering several hundreds, who were stepping bravely to their duty, did not fail to make the most elevating impression upon me. Rockel undertook to accompany them over the barricade in safety to the mastering place in front of the Town Hall. He took the opportunity ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... trees, their flower-packed gardens and trim hedges. Slowly they would pace along, enjoying the sweeter air of the suburbs, or, gardenless themselves, would stand to peep through garden-gates at the well-ordered array of geranium, calceolaria, verbena; sniffing the fragrance from the serried rows of stocks, the patches of mignonette, or the ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... wife and infant son: I leave them to my country's care, The field shall yet be won!' He rushed against the Austrian band In desperate career, And with his body, breast, and hand, Bore down each hostile spear; Four lances splintered on his crest, Six shivered in his side, Still on the serried files he pressed, He ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ran over the closely packed court—each one a little louder than the other. The audience ended by fairly roaring under the cumulative effect of absurdity. The Registrar laughed, the barristers laughed, the reporters laughed, the serried ranks of the miserable depositors watching anxiously every word, laughed like one man. They laughed hysterically—the poor wretches—on ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... the inspector suggested. "Make way there! Make way!" he cried authoritatively; and he swept her through the serried ranks which parted at the sound of his voice, at ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... or the mighty men of King David; Giants in heart they were, who believed in God and the Bible,— Ay, who believed in the smiting of Midianites and Philistines. Over them gleamed far off the crimson banners of morning; Under them loud on the sands, the serried billows, advancing, Fired along the line, and in regular ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... All that is supernatural in the Saul is viewed through the fervid atmosphere of David's soul. The magic of the wonderful Nocturne at the close, where he feels his way home through the appalled and serried gloom, is broken by no apparition; the whole earth is alive and awake around him, and thrills to the quickening inrush of the "new land"; but its light is the tingling emotion of the stars, and its voice the cry of the little brooks; and the thronging cohorts of ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... revelry, where thronged The bright and joyous, and the tearful wail Of stricken ones is heard, where erst the song And reckless shout resounded. It passed o'er The battle plain, where sword, and spear, and shield Flashed in the light of midday—and the strength Of serried hosts is shivered, and the grass, Green from the soil of carnage, waves above The crushed and mouldering skeleton. It came And faded like a wreath of mist at eve; Yet, ere it melted in the viewless air, It heralded its millions to their home In the ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... singing abruptly. Then the consciousness of the serried ranks of faces below there came with almost overwhelming force upon him, and he dared not look at her again. He felt the blood rushing ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... bright are their shields; Their lances from Valence; their banners white And blue and crimson. Mules and sumpter-beasts Are left behind. They mount their battle steeds, And forward press in closely serried lines. Clear was the day, and brilliant was the sun; No armor but reflected back the light. A thousand clarions sound their cheering blasts So loud, the French can hear—. Says Olivier: "Rolland, companion, hearken! Soon, methinks, We shall have battle with the Saracens!" To which Rolland: ...
— La Chanson de Roland • Lon Gautier
... Commander: Company retire slowly!" A man at the end of our serried line near the roadside has called the order to me. The order travels by word of mouth along our line. It is a long time before it reaches the riflemen furthest left. And as soon as the slightest movement is noticeable in the beet fields, the deadly hail ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... for ever, And towns that now in ruins lie: As fair and fertile meadows That wav'd with golden grain, Now wrapt in forest shadows And run to waste again. As graves full of the buried, Who fell in the dread hour Of battle in ranks serried, Whose like ...
— Paul Gerhardt's Spiritual Songs - Translated by John Kelly • Paul Gerhardt
... muzzle—steel to steel—we met, And fought like Romans and like Romans fell. Even as a cyclone, growling thunder, roars Down through a dusky forest, and its path Is strown with broken and uprooted pines Promiscuous piled in broad and broken swaths, So crashed our volleys through their serried ranks, Mowing great swaths of death; yet on and on, Closing the gaps and yelling like the fiends That Dante heard along the gulf of hell, Still came our furious foes. A cloud of smoke— Dense, sulphurous, stifling—covered all our ranks. Our steady, deadly rifles crackled still, And still ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... parlor, where the chocolate creams were partially cleared away. They were in a serried mass on two sides of the room, meeting near the centre, with the underground passage, through which Ben had worked his way to Carrie's dress. Mrs. Fraser had organized a band to fill pasteboard boxes, which she had obtained from the village, and she and her friends ...
— The Last of the Peterkins - With Others of Their Kin • Lucretia P. Hale
... which she thrust into the background, seeking to keep it hidden behind the serried ranks of its brothers-in-arms. And yet it insisted in mutinous fashion on pushing to the fore. Seeking to consider the Packards en masse, as a curse rather than as individuals, she found that she was remembering Steve ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... any of the host will dare to venture in?" "The ford is deep, the banks are steep, the island-shore lies wide; Nor man nor horse could stem its force, or reach the further side. See there! amidst the willow-boughs the serried bayonets gleam; They've flung their bridge,—they've won the isle; the foe have cross'd the stream! 10 Their volley flashes sharp and strong,—by all the saints! I trow There never yet was soldier born could ...
— The Ontario High School Reader • A.E. Marty
... serried masses of the centre of our anti-tuberculosis army, upon which we depend for the heavy, mass fighting and the great frontal attacks. But what of the right and the left wings, and the cloud of skirmishers and cavalry which is continually feeling ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... father had gone to bed, Salomy Jane sat by the open window of the sitting-room in an apparent attitude of languid contemplation, but alert and intent of eye and ear. It was a fine moonlit night. Two pines near the door, solitary pickets of the serried ranks of distant forest, cast long shadows like paths to the cottage, and sighed their spiced breath in the windows. For there was no frivolity of vine or flower round Salomy Jane's bower. The clearing was too recent, the life too practical for vanities ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... substantially the same serried interior; the hall had grown darker, though it was still struck here and there with the last crimson shafts of sunset, and one or two of the headless machines had been moved from their places for this or that purpose, and stood here and there about the twilit place. The green and red of their ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... manage their small, rapid horses in a marvellous manner. They seemed like centaurs, and the rapidity with which they broke up their squadron, in order immediately after to close up again at another place in dense masses, rendered a counter attack on the part of the serried ranks of ...
— The Coming Conquest of England • August Niemann
... march Metellus was everywhere, now in the van, now with The rearguard, now with the central column. His eye criticised every disposition and detected every departure from the rules; he saw that each soldier kept his line, that he filled his due place in the serried ranks that gathered round a standard, that he bore the appropriate burden of his food and weapons. Metellus preferred the removal of the opportunities for vice to the vindictive chastisement of the vicious; his wise and temperate measures produced a healthy state of ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... (C. W.) 'Corn', in 'The Atlantic Monthly', 70, 228, Aug., 1892, which, since it consists of but four lines and is more like Lanier's poem than are the others, may be quoted: "Drawn up in serried ranks across the fields That, as we gaze, seem ever to increase, With tasseled flags and sun-emblazoned shields, The glorious ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... helmets; shields at their necks, and in their hands lances. And all had their cognizances, so that each might know his fellow, and Norman might not strike Norman, nor Frenchman kill his countryman by mistake. Those on foot led the way, with serried ranks, bearing their bows. The knights rode next, supporting the archers from behind. Thus both horse and foot kept their course and order of march as they began; in close ranks at a gentle pace, that the one ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... and especially Master Rattlin;" the said Master Rattlin having very officiously wriggled himself into the first rank. Such is the sanctity of established authority, that we actually gave back, with serried files however, as our opponents advanced. All had now been lost, even our honour, had it not been for the gallant conduct of young Henry Saint Albans, a natural son of the Duke of Y—-, who was destined for the army, and, at that time, studying fortification, ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... ravens on their crag; the said families were always willing to accept invitations to dinners and dances; but as to admitting the strangers to their own houses, they were inexorable. Ready to scoff and disparage, jealous and niggardly, marrying only among themselves, the families formed a serried phalanx to keep out intruders. Of modern luxury they had no notion; and as for sending a boy to Paris, it was sending him, they thought to certain ruin. Such sagacity will give a sufficient idea of the old-world manners and customs of this ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... approaching an open space, and then you suddenly emerge from the forest shadows upon a delightful purple lawn lying smooth and free in the light like a lake. This is a glacier meadow. It is about a mile and a half long by a quarter of a mile wide. The trees come pressing forward all around in close serried ranks, planting their feet exactly on its margin, and holding themselves erect, strict and orderly like soldiers on parade; thus bounding the meadow with exquisite precision, yet with free curving lines such as Nature alone can draw. With inexpressible ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... shadows. When the trees broke or receded, the full splendour of the glacier was upon them to their left; and then for a space they must divine it as a presence behind the actual, faintly gleaming and flashing through the serried ranks of the forest. There were heaths and mosses under the pines; but otherwise for a while the path was flowerless; and Elizabeth ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... it seemed to give wings to our dull bodies. Every now and then we were overtaken by clouds of locusts, their little wings glistening like diamonds against the soft sky, or flocks of starlings darkened the air, or a serried line of wild geese passed majestically overhead. Then we came to the tents, and at our approach a dozen dogs rushed out to snap and snarl, and a hundred little naked children scampered and scuttled across the way. A stately Bedouin made us welcome, and, while Dominique transacted business ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book I - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... break that serried line of steel. Some even turned their horses and tried to back them in, but without avail. Many fell in the attempt. The Moslem ranks seemed impervious. In the end one man did what a host had failed ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume VII • Charles Morris
... only to give way to the next. We had leisure to notice minutiae, such as the ingenious tail one of the "lions" had constructed from a sweater. As time went on, the men worked themselves to a frenzy. From the serried ranks every once in a while one would break forth with a shriek to rush headlong into the fire, to beat the earth about him with his club, to rush over to shake one of us violently by the hand, or even to seize one of our feet between his two palms. Then with equal abruptness back he darted to ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... after execution to Blackheath, Finchley, and Kennington Commons, or Hounslow Heath, for the purpose of being there permanently suspended. In those days the approach to London on all sides seems to have lain through serried files of gibbets, growing closer and more thronged as the distance from the city diminished, till they and their occupants arranged themselves in rows of ghastly and grinning sentinels along both sides of the ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... them like himself, Sagacious, men of iron, watchful, firm, Against surprise and sudden panic proof. Their master fall'n, these will not flinch, but band To keep their master's power; thou wilt find Behind his corpse their hedge of serried spears. But, to match these, thou hast the people's love? On what a reed, my child, thou leanest there! Knowest thou not how timorous, how unsure, How useless an ally a people is Against the one and certain arm of power? Thy father perish'd in this people's cause, Perish'd before their eyes, yet ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... facade of the cliff, your eye is arrested by a singular appearance. You perceive a serried line, or rather a series of serried lines, running from the base in a vertical direction. On drawing nearer to these curious objects, you discover them to be ladders—the lowest set upon the earth, and reaching to a ledge, upon which the second is rested; this one extending to a second ledge, ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... apothegm that Providence is on the side of the heavy battalions. Zeal was oftentimes our main dependence, and on many a hard-fought field served to drive our small battalions, like a wedge, through the serried ...
— The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government • Jefferson Davis
... difficult to gather together. With the possible exception of one or two political adventurers like the then member for Shrewsbury, there is probably not a man in the House who is not well born or at least rich. Mr. Keir Hardie would look strange indeed in these serried ranks of portly gentlemen with high coat collars, cravats up to their chin, short-bodied coats showing the waistcoat beneath, and the tightly trousered legs. Yet this House, and its equally prim successors, had its obstruction, its personal wrangles, and its occasional duel. Peel was ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... in his shirt-sleeves in the middle of a large high room—a room without windows, but with a wide skylight at the top, that of a place of exhibition. It was furnished as a library, and the serried bookshelves rose to the ceiling, a surface of incomparable tone produced by dimly-gilt "backs" interrupted here and there by the suspension of old prints and drawings. At the end furthest from the door of admission was ...
— The Lesson of the Master • Henry James
... way in among the twisted trunks, planted closely together in serried ranks, and I followed sharp at his heels. The moment we were out of sight he turned and put down his gun against the roots of a big tree, and ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... serried bayonets squared the base of the hill, and made a compact, bristling hedge to hold back the common people. Through it marched the doomed Imperialists, each with his confessor and a platoon of guards, and so toiled on up the slope. The archduke looked about him. There ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... In serried ranks around me rise Two thousand tried and trusty friends; Instructive, famous, witty, wise, Each gladly his assistance lends To suit, at will, my varying mood; But none that aid will e'er intrude, Or ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... race were meant to be gregarious. What were the orator without his multitude? I might go further, and ask, What were the multitude without its orator? Flags and banners waved, and ribbons rippled that day in Bessarabia, for the serried legions of Russia marched in almost unending columns towards Ungheni, on the Roumanian frontier, and, after they had passed, the Emperor himself made for the same point with the Grand Duke Nicholas, and the Czarewitch, and General Ignatieff, and the Minister of War, and many other dignitaries ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... aside the Mess President's tinder-lighter, shatters the mute triumph of the serried black ranks of the hostile forces with one superb elevation of the eyebrows, smashes three matches in quick succession, and proves that all the time his mind has been preoccupied with weightier matters by saying after the manner of all true War ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 24, 1917 • Various
... whim, but I do crave—ocular evidence for my belief that those books were written and were published. I want to see them all ranged along goodly shelves. A few days ago I sat in one of those libraries which seem to be doorless. Nowhere, to the eye, was broken the array of serried volumes. Each door was flush with the surrounding shelves; across each the edges of the shelves were mimicked; and in the spaces between these edges the backs of books were pasted congruously with the ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... deep, the banks are steep, The island-shore lies wide: Nor man nor horse could stem its force, Or reach the further side. See there! amidst the willow boughs The serried bayonets gleam; They've flung their bridge—they've won the isle; The foe have crossed the stream! Their volley flashes sharp and strong— By all the Saints, I trow, There never yet was soldier born Could ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun
... mind behind it all, Hugh felt, but what a mind! how leisurely, how fanciful, how unfathomable! For whose pleasure were all these bright eccentric forms created? Certainly not for the pleasure of man, for Hugh thought of the acres and acres of wheat now rising in serried ranks in the deep country, with the poppies or the marigolds among them, all quietly unfolding their bells of scarlet flame, their round, sunlike faces, where no eye could see them, except the birds that flew over. Could ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... give me the place of honor, despite my protests, and soon I found myself lying between my host and his wife, while the other members of the household lay in serried rank beyond her on the mats that filled the hollow between the palm-trunks. All slept with the backs of their heads upon one timber, and the backs of their knees over the other, but I found comfort on the soft pile between them. My companions slumbered peacefully, as I ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... Serried breast to breast and in complete order, the horsemen of Martino turned to fly; the foot rabble who had come for spoil remained but for slaughter. They endeavoured to imitate their leaders; but how could they all elude the rushing chargers and sharp lances of ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... was Amy's territory during the hours when her husband was working, or endeavouring to work. Of necessity, Edwin Reardon used the front room as his study. His writing-table stood against the window; each wall had its shelves of serried literature; vases, busts, engravings (all of the inexpensive ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... 'minds of Mangonel; * Whose strings are ropes that make each shot to tell: And note the pipes that sound with shriek and cry, * The pipes that cast a fearful joyful spell; Espy the flagons ranged in serried rank * And crops becrowned with wine ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... charging host; For not an eye the storm that viewed Changed its proud glance of fortitude, Nor was one forward footstep stayed, As dropped the dying and the dead. Fast as their ranks the thunders tear, Fast they renewed each serried square; And on the wounded and the slain Closed their diminished files again, Till from their line scarce spears'-lengths three, Emerging from the smoke they see Helmet, and plume, and panoply, - Then waked their fire at once! Each musketeer's revolving knell, ...
— Some Poems by Sir Walter Scott • Sir Walter Scott
... Church, sacrificing her outposts and the ranks of her skirmishers to the preservation of her central and vital fortresses, put the brakes, through necessity, from the nature of the warfare waged against her, upon individual activity, and moved her soldiers in serried masses; and then it was the part and the glory of each one to move with the column. The need of repression has passed away. The authority of the Church and of her Supreme Head is beyond danger of being denied or obscured, and each Christian soldier ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... intonations that gave a value to each commonplace simple word, braced his nerves like a tonic. It might have been only the contrast with the recollections of the night, with the prospect visible through the open door—the serried lines of rain dropping aslant from the gray sky and elusively outlined against the dark masses of leafless woods that encircled the clearing; the dooryard half submerged with puddles of a clay-brown tint, embossed always with myriads of protruding ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... early December, London opened its eyes on a frigid grey mist. There are mornings when King Fog masses his molecules of carbon in serried squadrons in the city, while he scatters them tenuously in the suburbs; so that your morning train may bear you from twilight to darkness. But to-day the enemy's manoeuvring was more monotonous. From Bow even unto Hammersmith there draggled a dull, wretched vapour, like the ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... never come here!" and turned in maddest haste to fly. I took him up somewhat sharply with these words: "Since you have brought me here, I must perform some action worthy of a man;" and directing my arquebuse where I saw the thickest and most serried troop of fighting men, I aimed exactly at one whom I remarked to be higher than the rest; the fog prevented me from being certain whether he was on horseback or on foot. Then I turned to Alessandro and Cecchino, ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... backed by the great 12-inch guns, this splendid body of colonial troops were drawn up in serried ranks, fully equipped, and receiving their last instructions from their officers who, six months ago, like their men, were leading a peaceful civilian life in Australia and New Zealand 5,000 miles away. Now at the call of the empire they were about to disembark ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... and throngs them close, as a sheep-dog gathers the sheep. They crowd for shelter, and a great wall, leaning inland also, with its strong base to the sea, receives them. It is blank and sunny, and the trees within are sunny and dark, serried, and their tops swept and flattened by months of sea-storms. On the farther side there are gardens—gardens that have in their midst those quietest things in all the world and most windless, box-hedges and ponds. The gardens take shelter behind the scared and hurried ilex ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... inches were few, whose years only tender. One of Amilcare's rare acts of unpremeditated humanity had been to snatch him, a naked urchin of nine, from Barga, when (after a night surprise) he was raining fire and sword and the pains of hell upon that serried stronghold ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... showed as a black band a quarter of an inch high. Behind, the forest he had already left lay dwarfed in a ruled, serried line. But that was not all. Something was moving out upon the spotless plain of snow, something which appeared to be no more than crawling, ant-like, but was really traveling very fast. It looked like a smudged dot, nothing ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... said in a low voice, and Nanette nudged him angrily in the side with her elbow, so that he cried out, and attention would have been called to them but for a ripple of laughter which started on the edge of the crowd and was taken up by the serried ranks. ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... the Français could not tempt. It would be difficult to overrate the influence such an atmosphere, breathed in youth, must have on the taste and character. The absence of a sordid spirit, the curse of our material day and generation, the contact with intellects trained to incase their thoughts in serried verse or crisp and lucid prose, cannot but form the hearer’s mind into a higher and better mould. It is both a satisfaction and a hope for the future to know that these influences are being felt all over the capital and throughout the length and breadth ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... serried battalions of crime loll away the garish day, silence discreetly rules. Sleep and rest mark the sunlit hours. The late afternoon ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... took my life And marched against great Buckley, thundering My mandate that he count the ballots fair! Earth heard and shrank to half her size! Yon moon, Which rivaled then a liver's whiteness, paused That night at Butchertown and daubed her face With sheep's blood! Then my serried rank I drew Back to my stronghold without loss. To mark My care in saving human life and limb, The Peace Society bestowed on me Its leather medal and the title, too, Of Colonel. Yes, my genius is for war. Good land! I naturally dote ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... continued the work of checking the depredations of the Danes, and so successful was he that the freebooters became seized with a superstitious awe of his band. The rapidity of its maneuvering, the manner in which men, at one moment scattered, were in another formed in a serried mass, against which all their efforts broke as waves against a rock, seemed to them to be something superhuman. In that part of Wessex, therefore, the invaders gradually withdrew their forces across the frontier; but in other parts of the country, the tide of invasion being unchecked, large tracts ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty
... which they lay had the rich, burned smell of the hot days. A wind rustled the standing corn that formed a kind of wall behind them. The moon was in the sky and shone down across bank after bank of serried clouds. The grandiloquence went out of the voice of Telfer ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... Aberfilly formed the front rank, as these could be best relied upon to withstand the charge of the English horse. The gates were thrown open, and in close ranks the garrison sallied out, forming, as soon as they passed through, in the order arranged. So close and serried was the hedge of spears, so quiet and determined the attitude of the men, that, numerous as they were, the men of Buchan and the English lords shrank from an encounter with such adversaries, and with the banner of the king and his knights flying in their centre the little ...
— In Freedom's Cause • G. A. Henty
... hearken! For what manner of dream then is this that remembers The words that she sang on that morning of glory;— O love, set a word in my mouth for our meeting; Cast thy sweet arms about me to stay my hearts beating! Ah, thy silence, thy silence! nought shines on the darkness! —O close-serried throng of the days that I ...
— Poems By The Way & Love Is Enough • William Morris
... after a noble resistance, overpowered by this fresh body of enemies. Pappenheim's unexpected appearance revived the drooping courage of the Imperialists, and the Duke of Friedland quickly availed himself of the favourable moment to re-form his line. The closely serried battalions of the Swedes were, after a tremendous conflict, again driven across the trenches; and the battery, which had been twice lost, again rescued from their hands. The whole yellow regiment, the finest of all that distinguished themselves in this dreadful day, ...
— The History of the Thirty Years' War • Friedrich Schiller, Translated by Rev. A. J. W. Morrison, M.A.
... persons in order to confer your farewell remembrances on them; they will be waiting for you in the hallways. No matter how early or late the hour of your leaving may be, you find them there in a long and serried rank. ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... purely legendary feat of Tell, the best known and most popular in the early history of the Swiss Confederation. We are told how, at a critical moment in the great battle of Sempach, when the Swiss had failed to break the serried ranks of the Austrian knights, a man of Unterwalden, Arnold von Winkelried by name, came to the rescue. Commending his wife and children to the care of his comrades, he rushed toward the Austrians, gathered a number of their spears together against ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... of the Cove-head, in the act of charging upon the serried ranks of Looe's main guard, did Major Hymen face about and with sword still uplifted stare behind him, and continue to stare as ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... to the King was nigh unto the river and there the ranks were serried, but near the dyke were they more scattered, and the men thereof also the ...
— The Sagas of Olaf Tryggvason and of Harald The Tyrant (Harald Haardraade) • Snorri Sturluson
... hour was two, or something later; and a chill was stealing in upon the land, wafted gently southward from Long Island Sound. All the world beside himself seemed to slumber, breathless, insensate. Wraith-like, grey shreds of mist drifted between the serried boles of trees, or, rising, veiled the moon's wan and pallid face, that now was low upon the horizon. In silent rivalry long and velvet-black shadows skulked across the ample breadths of dew-drenched grass. Somewhere a bird stirred on its unseen perch, chirping sleepily; and in the rapt silence ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... has come to his own again. Earth and sea and sky pour out their largess of love. All the past crowds down to lay its treasures at your feet. Patriotism stands once more in the breach at Thermopylae,—bears down the serried hosts of Bannockburn,—lays its calm hand in the fire, still, as if it felt the pressure of a mother's lips,—gathers to its heart the points of opposing spears, to make a way for the avenging feet behind. All that the ages have of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... a fringe of weed and driftwood stretches a serried line along the sands, and now and then—too often on the flat shores of one of our northern estuaries, whence can be seen the white teeth of the sea biting at the shoals flanking the fairway—are mingled with the flotsam ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage
... brooding, with the pall straight before us, the funeral guns are heard indistinctly booming from the far forts, with the tap of drums in the serried street without, where troops and citizens are forming for the grand procession. We see through the window in the beautiful spring day that the grass is brightly green; and all the trees in blossom, show us through their archways the bronze and marble statues ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... beating a hasty retreat, was routed in the defiles of Beth-Horon, where two centuries before the Syrian hosts had been decimated by Judas the Maccabee. The two legions were cut to pieces. The fierce valor of the untrained national levies had broken the serried cohorts of the Roman veterans, and in the unexpectedness of this deliverance the party of rebellion for a time was triumphant among all sections of ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... fierce northern hurricane That sweeps his great plateau, Flushed with the triumph yet to gain, Came down the serried foe. Who heard the thunder of the fray Break o'er the field beneath, Knew well the watchword of that day Was "Victory ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)
... kind of a dooryard in front of the cave's mouth, with a stockade that we borrowed from Robinson Crusoe, driving pointed stakes close-serried and hoping they'd take root and sprout; but they didn't. Between times I made finger-drawings in the sand of plans for tiger traps and pitfalls. I couldn't dig pits, but I knew of two that might have been made to my order, a volcano having taken ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... possible to take the measure of its strata. At the end of a street, near Amelie's restaurant, there was a noise like that of a mill-race. The crowd was stemmed up against several ranks of police and soldiers. In front of the obstacles a serried mass was formed, howling, whistling, singing, laughing, and eddying this way and that.... The laughter of the people is the only means they have of expressing a thousand obscure and yet deep feelings which cannot find ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... that thronging multitude, ordered and disciplined by the tides of light and shadow, which roll in and out of the masses, resolving them into groups and single figures of almost matchless beauty and melting away into a sea of radiant aether, which tells us of the boundless space which surrounds the serried ranks of the Blessed. ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... the grass toward her, in their van the fading glow. All at once, as it were out of the twilight, the sunlight settled momentarily on the field at the bottom of the hill before her. Stark upright and in serried rows stretched the waste of last year's cornfield, the withered stalks touched with a passing glory, standing quite proudly erect and then—blue-gray darkness. A mellow waste delivering a valedictory! Next year it would doubtless ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... gray as well as in blue. At half past seven the first lines began to give signs of exhaustion, and its march over the rough ground while struggling with the enemy, had thinned and impaired it. It was time for Bragg's corps to come to the relief, and that superb line now moved up in serried strength. The first sign of slackening upon the part of the Confederates seemed to add vigor to the enemy's resistance. But bravely as they fought, they never recovered from the stun of the surprise. Their half of the battle was out of joint at the beginning, and it was never gotten right ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... the street. The hubbub of the preachers and the shouting of the people had died away, for the regiments had fallen into their places, and stood silent and stern, with the faint light from the lamps and windows playing over their dark serried ranks. A cool, clear moon shone down upon us from amidst fleecy clouds, which drifted ever and anon across her face. Away in the north tremulous rays of light flickered up into the heavens, coming and going ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... voice; even as one who struggling through rough briers hath trodden a snake on the ground unwarned, and suddenly shrinks fluttering back as it rises in anger and puffs its green throat out; even thus Androgeus drew away, startled at the sight. We rush in and encircle them with serried arms, and cut them down dispersedly in their ignorance of the ground and seizure of panic. Fortune speeds our first labour. And here Coroebus, flushed with success and spirit, cries: "O comrades, follow me where fortune points before us the path ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... thick with shield and spear As the rich man's wealthiest acre with the harvest of the year. There bade King Volsung tarry and dight the wedge-array; "For duly," he said, "doeth Siggeir to meet his guests by the way." So shield by shield they serried, nor ever hath been told Of any host of battle more glorious with the gold; And there stood the high King Volsung in the very front of war; And lovelier was his visage than ever heretofore. As he rent apart the peace-strings ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... in their massive phalanx, the Lacedaemonians presented an almost impenetrable body—sweeping slowly on, compact and serried—while the hot and undisciplined valor of the Persians, more fortunate in the skirmish than the battle, broke itself in a thousand waves upon that moving rock. Pouring on in small numbers at a time, ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... minute, a wild fury against him arose in the guilty woman's heart—a bitter sense of humiliation and injustice. And, when she looked upon the white-robed figure, standing apart from the serried mass of faces, she understood with a great pang how much he had been alone in the past twenty-five years, fighting his way through life amid alien surroundings, dragged down by the burden of her follies. He was walking to the ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... so that, viewing the spectacle from above, you get the illusion of being in a stationary airship, anchored up among the clouds; imagine these mountain peaks—hundreds upon hundreds of them—rising one behind the other, stretching away in endless, serried rank until the eye swims and the mind staggers at the task of trying to count them; imagine them splashed and splattered over with all the earthly colors you ever saw and a lot of unearthly colors you never saw before; imagine them carved and fretted and scrolled into all ...
— Roughing it De Luxe • Irvin S. Cobb
... ride, and began to coast down the long slope, leaving a trail of grey dust to mark his flight. There was a peculiar exhilaration in the dry heat of the October afternoon. Flocks of crows passed over his head with raucous cries. The cornstalks were stacked in serried array, like Indian wigwams, and heaps of apples, red and yellow and russet brown, ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... taken their places several minutes before the time fixed for the Reader's appearance upon the platform. Occasionally it happened, nevertheless, that a stray couple or so would be still drifting in, here and there, among the serried ranks of the stalls, when, book in hand, with a light step, a smile on his face, and a flower in his button-hole, the author had already rapidly advanced and taken his place before his quaintly constructed but graceful little reading-desk. Then it was, perhaps, ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... froze round MURRAY as he read carefully prepared statement. When he sat down, faint murmur of applause rose from scanty muster on Liberal side. No sound, whether of approval or disapproval, broke the stillness of the serried benches opposite. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 25, 1914 • Various |
