"Beetling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a dancing companion of my mother's, and had a son and two daughters, the eldest a nice girl of my age, with whom I was intimate, so I gladly accepted an invitation to visit them at Balmuto. Lord Balmuto was a large coarse-looking man, with black hair and beetling eyebrows. Though not vulgar, he was passionate, and had a boisterous manner. My mother and her sisters gave him the nickname of the "black bull of Norr'away," in allusion to the northern position of Balmuto. Mrs. Boswell was gentle and ladylike. The son had a turn ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville
... blister on his head. Within the sound of the castle-clock There stands a huge and rugged rock, And I have heard the peasants say, That the grieving groom at noon that day Found gallant Roland, cold and stiff, At the base of the black and beetling cliff. Beside the rock there is an oak, Tall, blasted by the thunder-stroke, And I have heard the peasants say, That there Sir Rudolph's mantle lay, And coiled in many a deadly wreath A venomous ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... arrangements; there still remained the jobs of management and distribution. The President of General Mortuary, an ebullient fellow affectionately called Sarcophagus Sam, put it well. "As long as I have a single prospective customer, and a single Stockholder," he said, mangling a stogie and beetling his brows at the one reporter who'd showed up for the press conference, "I'll try to put him in a coffin so I ...
— And All the Earth a Grave • Carroll M. Capps (AKA C.C. MacApp)
... a hundred half-hearted Romans. The forty thousand Moslems were stronger far than the two hundred and forty thousand of the enemy." The combat lasted for weeks; but at the last the Byzantine force was utterly routed, and thousands hurled in wild confusion over the beetling cliffs of the Yermuk into the yawning chasm ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... strength he stood; His rocky brow, all shagg'd with wood, O'er-look'd his base, where, doubling strong, The inward torrent pours along; Then ebbing turns, and turns again, To meet the Severn and the Main, Beneath the dark shade sweeping round, Of beetling PERSFIELD'S fairy ground, By buttresses of rock upborne, The rude APOSTLES ...
— The Banks of Wye • Robert Bloomfield
... pilot had resolved to make sure of the destruction of the ship that night; for, not content with running her within a foot or two of innumerable reefs, he at last steered in so close to the shore that the beetling cliffs actually seemed to overhang the deck. When the sun rose, the breeze died away; but sufficient wind continued to fill the upper sails and to urge the vessel gently onward for some time after the surface of ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... takes acres of roses to make a flask of perfume; and all the long life of a man is represented in his ultimate character. Character is formed like those chalk cliffs in the south, built up eight hundred feet, beetling above the stormy sea; and all made up of the relics of microscopic animals. So you build up a great solid structure—yourself—out of all your deeds. You are making your character, your habits, your opinions.—And you are making your reputation ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... bloodhound I stuck to my task until I suddenly found myself at the base of the park wall, at the foot of the diagonal fracture in the face of the cliff where I had climbed when I discovered the golden trout. As I have said, the fracture led diagonally up the towering face of the beetling precipice. ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... on the table in front of them were the drafts of Flixman's will and the engrossed, unsigned copy, together with such other formidable-looking documents as Goldenfein happened to find in his pockets. He rose majestically as Fischko entered and turned on him a beetling frown. ...
— Elkan Lubliner, American • Montague Glass
... steps of the vast edifice beetling like a granite crag above them, with the stone groups of an allegory of life-insurance foreshortened in the bas-relief overhead. March absently lifted his eyes to it. It was suddenly strange after so many years' familiarity, and so was the well-known street ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... foreign elements, the most constant impression is one of a multiplied body politic. Belgrade is said to have more cripples than any other capital of Europe. And Berlin comes second. It is a one-eyed city, a city of one-legged men, a city of men with beetling brows and contracted eyes, a city of unrelenting ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... a thousand feet up, his ascent was stopped by a sheer hundred-foot cliff. He had seen it beetling above him and knew beforehand that he could not hope to scale such a precipice; yet he clambered up to it, still examining the rock with minute care. As he walked across the waterworn shelf at the foot of the sheer ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... semi-detached villas and lodges and crescents of Keeton; and there too were the humbler cottages. On the other side of the bridge were the business streets and the clustering shops, most of them old-fashioned and dark, with low, beetling fronts and narrow panes in the windows, and only here and there a showy and modern establishment, with its stucco front and its plate glass. The streets were all so narrow that they seemed as if they must be only passages leading to broader ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... toward Stelton for orders, as he had always done, and in those beetling brows and threatening eyes saw a menace of personal injury that ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... the dangers on the coast of the Somme, they were hidden by water; and on a sunny morning who can realize shoals that are so fatal in bad weather, but are concealed by the smiling calm of a fine day? Not so with the great beetling cliffs of sharp red flint now glittering alongside my course for miles and miles far beyond what the eye could reach. These formed an impressive object ever in sight, and generally begetting, as it was seen, ...
— The Voyage Alone in the Yawl "Rob Roy" • John MacGregor
... of Acadia, which were then undefined, stretched along the borders of the bay, presenting a vast and uncultivated tract, varying through every shade of sterility and verdure; from the bare and beetling promontory, which defied the encroaching tide, the desert plain, and dark morass, to the impervious forest, the sloping upland, and the green valley, watered by its countless streams. A transient sun-beam, at times, gilded this ...
— The Rivals of Acadia - An Old Story of the New World • Harriet Vaughan Cheney
... inches shorter), Selaigneaux, and Borreby.[20] Dr. Beddoe thinks that the narrow-skulled Belgae on the whole reinforced the meso- or brachycephalic round barrow folk in Britain. Dr. Thurnam identifies the latter with the Belgae (Broca's Kymri), and thinks that Gaulish skulls were round, with beetling brows.[21] Professors Ripley and Sergi, disregarding their difference in stature and higher cephalic index, identify them with the short Alpine race (Broca's Celts). This is negatived by Mr. Keane.[22] Might not both, however, have originally sprung from a common ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... sight to watch a herd of ibex, when undisturbed, the kids frisking here and there on pinnacles or ledges of rocks and beetling cliffs, where there seems scarcely safe foothold for anything much larger than the grasshopper or a fly; the old mother looking calmly on or grazing steadily while the day is young, cropping the soft moss or tender herbs and sweet short grass springing from the crevices of the craggy precipices ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... navarch. The cry went up and down the line of the Hellenes, "loud as when billows lash the beetling crags." The trailing oars beat again into the water, and even as the ships once more gained way, Themistocles nodded to Ameinias, and he to the keleustes. The master oarsman leaped from his seat and crashed his gavel down upon ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... ladder deliberately, pausing on the lower steps to look around with his little, pig's eyes. His head was set well forward on his thick, muscular neck, so that he had to look out from under his beetling brows in a manner peculiarly ape-like. His heavy face was smooth-shaven, and his blue-black jowls and chin looked painfully smooth. His coarse, black hair was brushed back and plastered ...
— In the Orbit of Saturn • Roman Frederick Starzl
... traveller from Innsbrueck to Munich, up the lovely valley of the silver Inn, many castles appear, one after another, each on its beetling cliff or gentle hill,—appear and disappear, melting into the dark fir trees that grow so thickly on every side,—Laneck, Lichtwer, Ratholtz, Tratzberg, Matzen, Kropfsberg, gathering close around the entrance to the dark ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... the awful throne, Leaving the seraphs ranged in flaming tiers, Winged his dark way through those unpinioned spheres, And on the void's black beetling edge, alone, Stood with raised wings, and listened for the tone Of God's command to reach his eager ears, While Chaos wavered, for she felt her years Unsceptered now in that convulsive zone. Night trembled. And as one hath oft beheld A lamp ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... spot or the hour. It was just here the man Langdon appointed to meet me." We halted for some minutes and listened attentively, but not a sound was to be heard except the low, soft, and musical lap of the tide as it glided by the shingly beach. Above us was the lofty cliff beetling over our heads, its dark outline ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston
... sun of August 17, 1777, were glancing down the long valley, which opening to the East, lets in the early rays of morning, upon the village of Stockbridge. Then, as now, the Housatonic crept still and darkling around the beetling base of Fisher's Nest, and in the meadows laughed above its pebbly shoals, embracing the verdant fields with many a loving curve. Then, as now, the mountains cradled the valley in their eternal arms, all round, from the Hill of the Wolves, on the north, to the peaks that guard the Ice Glen, away ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... son dragged along, begrimed with dust, she tore her hair, and shrieked aloud, and tossed far away her glistening veil. And his father, King Priam, wailed and mourned; and with him all the men and women in the city, as if the beetling towers of Ilium were already smouldering in fire. Hardly could they keep the aged father from rushing through the gates; for he threw himself in the dust and supplicated each man by name: "O friend, forbear! and if you ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... away was a narrow passage, which leaving the Rue St. Honore turned at right angles under a beetling archway, to emerge in the Rue du Roule. If he could gain that passage unseen by the mob! He would gain it. With a swift movement, his mind made up, he took a step forward. He tightened his grasp of the girl's waist, and, seizing with his left hand the end of the bar which the assailants ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... from the Peak, once beheld, can never be forgotten. The first sensation is that of complete isolation. The silence is profound. The clouds are below us, and noiselessly break in foaming billows against the faces of the beetling cliffs. Occasionally the silence is broken by the deep roll of thunder from the depths beneath, as though the voice of the Creator were uttering a stern edict of destruction. The storm rises, the mists envelop ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... vest, And learn to follow, without giddiness, To heights where all is vision, and surprise, And vague conjecture.—He must waste by night The studious taper, far from all resort Of crowds and folly, in some still retreat; High on the beetling promontory's crest, Or in the caves of the vast wilderness, Where, compass'd round with Nature's wildest shapes, He may be driven to centre all his thoughts In the great Architect, who lives confess'd In rocks, ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... the column halted beside a stream, made camp and prepared the evening meal. From the thick foliage of the nearby jungle a pair of fierce eyes watched the activities of the uniformed blacks with silent intensity and curiosity. From beneath beetling brows the creature saw the boma constructed, the fires ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... country, but to explain why he did not want to emigrate. While he was speaking we passed a cartload of yellow grapes that drenched us in jingle of mulebells and in dizzying sweetness of bubbling ferment. A sombre man with beetling brows strode at the mule's head; in the cart, brown feet firmly planted in the steaming slush of grapes, flushed face tilted towards the ferocious white sun, a small child with a black curly pate rode ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... arrival thereat. Enjoy what is close at hand. Admire now the blue glories of the proud hills, recumbent in careless grace of majesty in the indolent sunlit atmosphere; gaze then into the sombre depths of solemn retreating forest; tremble anon in the black shadow of the fierce rock beetling over your bridle way; and fill your rejoicing being with the fresh-distilled vigor of the springy step of your charger on the turf. It will put bounding manliness into your sluggish civilian blood. Read each page, each chapter for itself; or regard it as one handsome marble square in the tesselated ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... alluded to is an opening among high pinnacles, and is nearly surrounded by naked and ragged rocks. The path led through its centre, always ascending on an inclined plane, and disappeared through a narrow gorge around the brow of a beetling cliff. Pierre pointed out the latter as the pass by far the most dangerous on this side the Col, in the season of the melting snows, avalanches frequently rolling from its crags. There was no cause for apprehending this well-known Alpine danger, however, in the present moment; ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... press is something like a beetling-machine, in which wedges are driven in between the bags, containing, of course in a bruised condition, ...
— Lectures on Popular and Scientific Subjects • John Sutherland Sinclair, Earl of Caithness
... to notice the beauties of nature, were in ecstasies of delight, exclaiming anew at every turn in the road, calling each other's, mamma's or grandpa's attention to the sparkling river, the changing shadows on the mountainsides, here a beetling crag, there a waterfall or secluded glen. Having rested the previous night, sleeping soundly at a hotel, they were not wearied with travel but seemed fresher now than when ...
— Elsie's children • Martha Finley
... him to have retreated with any chance of safety. The cliff upon which he had been standing, was a sort of promontory projecting beyond the general line of the precipice; and towards the mountain slope above his escape had been already cut off by his challenger. On all other sides of him was the beetling cliff. He had no alternative but fight, or be "knocked over." It was less a matter of choice than necessity that determined him upon ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... Teeka's great teeth, not so large as the males, of course, but still mighty, handsome things by comparison with Tarzan's feeble white ones. And her beetling brows, and broad, flat nose, and her mouth! Tarzan had often practiced making his mouth into a little round circle and then puffing out his cheeks while he winked his eyes rapidly; but he felt that he could ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... success of the French cotton manufacture. In 1832 he patented his invention of the Radial Arm for "winding on" in the self-acting mule, now in general use; and in future years he took out sundry patents for roving, slubbing, spinning, and doubling cotton and other fibrous materials; and for weaving, beetling, and ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... army were caught in an awkward position, the army was dispersed, and he driven to the verge of a precipice, where he must choose between captivity or death. He chose the latter and leaped from the beetling crags. ...
— Historic Tales, vol 10 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... had tracked his feet To this rocky, wild retreat; And when morning met his view, Her mild glances met it, too. Ah, your Saints have cruel hearts! Sternly from his bed he starts, And with rude, repulsive shock, Hurls her from the beetling rock. ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... cheer them on. And often the limits are almost passed, As the swift ball flies and returns. At last It leaps the line at a single bound From the fair Wiwaste's sturdy stroke, Like a fawn that flies from the baying hound. Wild were the shouts, and they rolled and broke On the beetling bluffs and the hills profound, An echoing, jubilant sea of sound. Wakawa, the chief, and the loud acclaim Announced the end of the well-fought game, And the fair ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... memorable spot, the face of the mountain is still more savagely hacked and torn. It is a maze of yawning chasms and gullies, in the angles of which rise beetling crags and piles of detached boulders that seem to have been gotten ready to be launched below. But the strange influx of strength I had received seemed inexhaustible. I found a way without effort, and soon stood upon the topmost crag ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... or sixty of both sides had fallen. But it was noted as an ominous fact that in spite of shell fire the Boers still lingered upon the western flank. Were they coming on again? They showed no signs of it. And yet they waited in groups, and looked up towards the beetling crags above them. What were they waiting for? The sudden crash of a murderous Mauser fire upon the summit, with the rolling volleys of the British infantry, supplied ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the daughter of one ever attracted by the frontier, and all my life had been passed amid primitive conditions—the wide out-of-doors was my home, and the lonely places called me. The broad, rapid sweep of the river up which we won our slow passage, the great beetling cliffs dark in shadows, and crowned by trees, the jutting rocks whitened by spray, the headlands cutting off all view ahead, then suddenly receding to permit of our circling on into the unknown—here extended a panorama of which I ...
— Beyond the Frontier • Randall Parrish
... door leading into the rear room opened, and in the frame stood the heavy figure of Angus Fitzpatrick, his eyes glittering under the beetling white brows. For a silent moment, he took in the scene ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... Vetsburg cast a beetling glance down upon Miss Kaufman, there so small beside him, and tinked peremptorily against her plate three times with his fork. "Eat, young lady, like your mama wants you should, or, by golly! I'll string you up ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... rays of the sun streamed from a saffron sky in the west and blazed in the red, yellow, and pink foliage on the mountain-side. The light brought into clearer outline the brown peaks and beetling crags that rose bleak and bare above the wealth of color, beyond the dark, evergreen stretches of pines and mountain cedars. The gorgeous tail of a peacock spread and gleamed under the cherry-trees in the back yard. A sleek calf was running back and forth in a little lot, and a brindled ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben
... The aisles, deep canyons of eternal build; The transepts, valleys with God's splendor filled; The shrines, white waterfalls in leaf-laced drapery; The choir stands westward by the sounding shore; The cliffs like beetling pipes set high in air; Roll from the beach the thunders crashing there; The high wind-voices chord the breakers' roar; And wondrous harmonies of praise and prayer Swell to the forest ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... cry came; but I knew every inch of the beach for a mile up and down, and knew, too, that there was but one place in which with ordinary prudence there could be the slightest danger. So with unerring instinct I flew along the wet shingle to "Raymond's Cliff." At this point the beetling line of rocks which coiled and frowned along the coast terminated abruptly in precipitous crags. On one side it was sheer precipice, but on the other the cliff, exposed both to wind and wave, washed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... latter my distinguished relative, Mr. Will Esmond, went as captain), was embarked at New York, and our armament sailed up the noble Hudson River, that presents finer aspects than the Rhine in Europe to my mind: nor was any fire opened upon us from those beetling cliffs and precipitous "palisades," as they are called, by which we sailed; the enemy, strange to say, being for once unaware of the movement we contemplated. Our first landing was on the Eastern ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... unexpected places, come across a little mound, perhaps covered with stones, under which lie the mouldering bones of some unfortunate adventurer. Above, now on a rude board, then on a detached rock, or maybe on the wall of a beetling canyon, he may frequently read, in crude pencilling or rougher carving, the legend of ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... breakers spouted and bellowed; loud reverberations, heavy sprays flying and falling, succeeded one another from second to second; and I saw myself, if I ventured nearer, dashed to death upon the rough shore or spending my strength in vain to scale the beetling crags. ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... minor novelty. And on the swift train, if you draw down the curtain against the glare, or turn to your book, you are sure to miss something of interest—a deep canon rift in the plain, a turn that gives a wide view glowing in a hundred hues in the sun, a savage gorge with beetling rocks, a solitary butte or red truncated pyramid thrust up into the blue sky, a horizontal ledge cutting the horizon line as straight as a ruler for miles, a pointed cliff uplifted sheer from the plain and laid in regular courses of Cyclopean masonry, the battlements of a fort, ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... four leagues of mountain-road, apparently inaccessible; but the sure-footed horses, though stepping on loose and nearly precipitous rocks, rarely stumbled. The mountain of Curu is volcanic, a chaos of rent rocks, beetling precipices, and masses of lava that have been disgorged from the burning crater. Yet from every crag and crevice of the rock spring the most magnificent trees, twisted with flowering parasites, shrubs ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... valley than we used to imagine when we wanted to "do" England, before it burst upon us that most of the wherewithal was used up. Nothing could be more dreamy and daintily pretty than landscape and waterscape, though here and there is a bit which might be gray and grim if the beetling rocks weren't hatted with moss and mantled with delicate green trees. Wherever there is a boulder in the river, the bright water laughs and plays round it, as if ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... upon us!" she said. "The crest of our native land lies before us. We will conquer those beetling crags, or die trying. All ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the other Arabs among the kitchen pots—yet they are smarter than any of us Europeans, all of whom have a frayed air. This, I suppose, would not be so in desert-fiction. Nothing would be said about hot-water bottles leaking, or beetles beetling (one doesn't come to Egypt to see live scarabs), or draughts raging, or camels gobbling, or flags flapping all night. (Memo: Abolish flags, even ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... they were in Virginia or Kentucky, only, if possible, in a somewhat more ruminant manner. It gave me the single bit of home feeling I could muster, for it was, I must confess, rather desolate standing alone in a strange land, under those beetling crags, with the clouds almost resting on our heads, and the rain coming down in a steady, wet, monotonous fashion. The half-dozen little dark log or frame-houses, with their double windows and turf roofs, standing about at all sorts of angles to the road, as if they had rolled down the mountain ...
— Elsket - 1891 • Thomas Nelson Page
... A panorama more deplorably desolate no human imagination can conceive. To the right and left, as far as the eye could reach, there lay outstretched, like ramparts of the world, lines of horridly black and beetling cliff, whose character of gloom was but the more forcibly illustrated by the surf which reared high up against it its white and ghastly crest, howling and shrieking forever. Just opposite the promontory upon whose apex we were placed, and ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... infernal regions. They look as if they had just been dragged up from the central furnace of the earth. Life seems to have fled in terror from the vicinity; even lichens, the children of the bare rocks, refuse to clothe the scathed and beetling crags. For some moments, made mute by the dreadful sight, we stood like statues on the rim of the mighty caldron, with our eyes riveted on the abyss below, lost in contemplating that which can not be described. The panorama from this lofty summit is more pleasing, but equally sublime. Toward ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... that in the breeze, fresh and balmy as it blew, I could feel the wind off shore. "At last," said I,—"at last!" as I stepped into the little wherry which shot alongside of us, and we glided into the still basin of Cove. How I remember every white-walled cottage, and the beetling cliffs, and that bold headland beside which the valley opens, with its dark-green woods, and then Spike Island. And what a stir is yonder, early as it is; the men-of-war tenders seem alive with people, while still the little village is sunk in slumber, ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... the north side and the muddy shallows of the Isle of Orleans. Sheering out where the Montmorency roars over a precipice in a shining cataract, the canoes glided across St. Charles River among the forests of masts heaving to the tide below the beetling ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... put forth a statement to the effect that poets can only be bred in a mountainous country, where they could lift up their eyes to the hills. Rock and ravine, beetling crag, singing cascade, and the heights where the lightning plays and the mists hover are certainly good timber for poetry—after you have caught your poet—but Nature eludes all formula. Again, it is the human interest that adds vitality to art—they ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... English home by the cranberry marshes of the Baltic, drove their long ships upon the long rocky peninsula of the Cotentin, which juts out, like a French Cornwall, from the mainland of Normandy up to the steep cliffs and beetling crags of busy Cherbourg. There they built themselves little hamlets and villages of true English type, whose very names to this day remind one of their ancient Saxon origin. Later on, the Danes or Northmen conquered the country, which ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... believe that they were in the track of steamers and innumerable sail-boats, and that the distant shores did not slope down to a level plain, on which the grass and grain would wave in the coming June; but when Burt turned southward and drove under the great beetling mountains, and told her that their granite feet were over a hundred yards deep in the water, she understood the marvellous engineering of the frost-spirit that had spanned the river, where the tides are so swift, and had so strengthened it in ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... up together over the ancient, cliff-dwellers' trail, where each foothold was worn deep in the rock; but as they sat within the shadow of the beetling cliff Drusilla sighed again. ...
— Silver and Gold - A Story of Luck and Love in a Western Mining Camp • Dane Coolidge
... stupendous under-ground palace, that laughs to scorn the puny efforts of man in that branch of business. She gets up sugar-loaf mountains, pillars of salt, great granite breastworks, and stone towers; hews out figure-heads, old men's noses on the beetling cliffs of New Hampshire, and throws up rocky palisades along the Hudson, that win wonder and delight from the floating million. Instances out of all number might be raked up, home and abroad, to show how the old dame has cut didoes ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... thick lipped, and heavy heeled, With woolly hair, large eyes, and even teeth, A forehead high, and beetling at the brows Enough to show a strong perceptive thought Ran out beyond the eyesight in all things— A negro with no claim to any right, A savage with no knowledge we possess Of science, art, or books, or government— Slave from a slaver to the Georgia coast, His life disposed of at the market ...
— Stories in Verse • Henry Abbey
... any keel like the teeth of a saw; and over these rolled the roaring breakers with a clutch to the back-wash that bade the gazing sailors beware. Birds, birds in myriads upon myriads, screamed and circled over the eerie heights of the beetling cliffs. This did not look like Kamchatka. These birds were not birds of the Asiatic home port. These cliffs were not like the snow-rimmed mountains of ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... surprises through a deep, winding gorge, turning and twisting past overhanging cliffs of incredible height. Above all, there is the fascination of finding here and there under the swaying vines, or perched on top of a beetling crag, the rugged masonry of a bygone race; and of trying to understand the bewildering romance of the ancient builders who ages ago sought refuge in a region which appears to have been expressly designed ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... in the middle of the office, his thick eyebrows beetling, his lower jaw trembling a little. At first she thought he had been drinking; then she saw that he was sober, but stirred by a deep and stern emotion totally unlike his usual transient angers. And suddenly she understood that, until then, she had never really noticed him or thought about him. Except ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... crowds, he saw the marshal's hand stretched to seize Adam, he saw most clearly of all the tearful eyes under the beetling brows. Henry's voice shook, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... fatigue of scrambling and stumbling thus far had been enormous. It had been necessary to ascend plateau after plateau by sinuous and crumbling ledges, which at a distance looked impracticable to goats. More than once, in face of some beetling precipice, or on the brink of some gaping chasm, it seemed as if the journey had come to an end. Long detours had to be made in order to connect points which were only separated by slight intervals. ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... which Belding said was a call to supper, turned the men back toward the house. Facing that way, Gale saw dark, beetling ridges rising from the oasis and leading up to bare, black mountains. He had heard Belding call them No Name Mountains, and somehow the appellation suited ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... of beetling brows rolled darkly over me. Had I stood beneath an overhanging cliff, with the ocean waves dashing at my feet, I could not have felt more awe or dread. A mist settled on ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... Woman. Children. Presidential Candidates. Trolley Cars. Everything smiles to me." (The Complete Whitmanite) (2) "From the frowning tower of Babel on which the insectile impotence of man dared to contend with the awful wrath of the Almighty, through the granite bulk of the beetling Pyramids lifting their audacious crests to the star-meshed skies that bend down to kiss the blue waters of Father Nile and the gracious nymphs laving their blithesome limbs in the pools that stud the sides of Pentelicus, down to our own Washington, throned like an empress on the banks of ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... They slaughter'd, I, (the faulchion at my side Drawn forth) cut loose the hawser of my ship, And all my crew enjoin'd with bosoms laid Prone on their oars, to fly the threaten'd woe. They, dreading instant death tugg'd resupine Together, and the galley from beneath 160 Those beetling[39] rocks into the open sea Shot gladly; but the rest all perish'd there. Proceeding thence, we sigh'd, and roamed the waves, Glad that we lived, but sorrowing for the slain. We came to the AEaean isle; there dwelt The awful Circe, Goddess amber-hair'd, Deep-skill'd ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer
... they traveled Sprigg, of course, had no means of judging; but the moon had well nigh climbed to the top of the sky, when, having left the morass far behind them, they came to the foot of another lofty mountain, where, under the shadow of a beetling cliff, yawned the rocky jaws of a huge cavern, into which Will-o'-the-Wisp led the way, his big, dim lamp beginning to brighten the moment it entered the subterranean gloom. Hardly had they crossed the threshold when Sprigg could perceive ...
— The Red Moccasins - A Story • Morrison Heady
... infamous resort, there was a low-browed, beetling shop, below a pent-house roof, where iron, old rags, bottles, bones, and greasy offal were bought. Upon the floor within, were piled up heaps of rusty keys, nails, chains, hinges, files, scales, weights, and refuse iron of all kinds. Secrets that few ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... neighbours of Bembina woes untold. And here Eurystheus bade me try my first Passage of arms, and slay that fearsome thing. So with my buxom bow and quiver lined With arrows I set forth: my left hand held My club, a beetling olive's stalwart trunk And shapely, still environed in its bark: This hand had torn from holiest Helicon The tree entire, with all its fibrous roots. And finding soon the lion's whereabouts, I grasped my bow, and on the bent ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... intermediate space, three rocks which might truly be called "forked promontories" from their sharp pyramidical shape, jutted abruptly out of the beach, and were connected by a sort of natural causeway to the main land. Beyond, a wild and rocky valley ran inland, and the time-worn ruins of —— Castle, beetling over the heights, terminated the view in this direction. This valley formed the bed of a small stream, which ran by the end of the rocks, composing a channel by which coasting vessels could run up and discharge their cargoes for the village of Torwich, only part of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 375, June 13, 1829 • Various
... matted together with sea rushes on the east; and only accessible to an enemy on the south-east, which is guarded by a deep, dry ditch, and a series of towers in the wall, on each side of the gateway. Nature has mantled the rock with lichens of various rich tints: its beetling brow is 150 feet above the level of the sea, upon a stratum of mouldering rock, apparently scorched with violent heat, and having beneath it a close flinty sandstone. Its crown is girt with walls and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 548 - 26 May 1832 • Various
... us as we stood round these shattered remains and realized the truth of Lord John Roxton's words. The beetling head of the cliff projected over the cane-brake. Undoubtedly he had fallen from above. But had he fallen? Had it been an accident? Or—already ominous and terrible possibilities began to form ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and unscrupulousness. With the exception of a small, bristling mustache, his face was clean shaven, with here and there a speck of dried blood due to a carelessly or unskillfully handled razor. A single deep-set gray eye was shadowed by a beetling brow, over which a crop of coarse black hair, slightly streaked with gray, fell almost low enough to mingle with his black, bushy eyebrows. His coat had not been brushed for several days, if one might judge from the accumulation of dandruff upon the collar, and his ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... jagged scar, searing its way up the range in flights that seemed at times to run almost perpendicular and which faded, only to reappear again, like the trail of some gigantic cut-worm, mark above mark, as it circled the smaller hills, cut into the higher ones, was lost at the edge of some great beetling rock, only to reappear once more, hundreds of feet overhead. The eyes of Barry Houston grew suddenly serious. He reached into the toolbox, and bringing forth the jack, affixed the chains, forgetting his usually cheery whistle, forgetting even to take notice when an investigative jay ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... castle, connected with almost every era of English history, had for its nucleus a Saxon stronghold, which succeeded a Roman fortress, as that in turn succeeded a Celtic camp. The ruin covers a large space of ground on a hill overlooking the old town. There is no majesty of beetling crags, no girdle of turbulent sea, but the dignity of its size, its age, its story, is all-satisfying. It is a good, a fitting spot for an American to make a pilgrimage to. A noble, eloquent, peaceful sadness pervades it, and generations shrink to dots. And Nature herself has had pity ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... forget to mention the nest under the mountain ledge, the nest of the common pewee,—a modest mossy structure, with four pearl-white eggs,—looking out upon some wild scene and overhung by beetling crags. After all has been said about the elaborate, high-hung structures, few nests perhaps awaken more pleasant emotions in the mind of the beholder than this of the pewee,—the gray, silent rocks, with caverns and dens where the fox and the wolf lurk, and just out of their reach, ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... is the speed of my little wherry, As afar from Derry its path it ploughs; Heavy my heart out of Erin steering And nearing Alba of the beetling brows. ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... broken with pits, and ruins of old structures; but when at last they stood upon the top to rest, and looked at the spectacle presented them over in the northwest—at the Temple and its courtly terraces, at Zion, at the enduring towers white beetling into the sky beyond—the mother was strengthened with a love ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... soldier suddenly remembered that the good wife Breboeuf did not speak a word of English, and he was properly mystified. By that time, however, Pierre and the little one were far from Piziquid. With a merry breeze behind them they were racing under the beetling front ...
— The Raid From Beausejour; And How The Carter Boys Lifted The Mortgage • Charles G. D. Roberts
... Trevennack's daughter, well trained from her babyhood to high and airy climbs. She chose an easy spot where it was possible to spring across by a series of boulders, arranged accidentally like stepping-stones; and in a minute she was standing on the main crag itself, a huge beetling mass of detached serpentine pushed boldly out as the advance-guard of the land into the assailing waves, and tapering at its top into a ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... of a thousand trees, Lunging out her lightnings, And beetling o'er the seas— O Ship, how brave and fair, That fought so oft and well, On open decks you manned the gun Armorial.[4] What cheering did you share, Impulsive in the van, When down upon leagued France and Spain We English ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville
... them down to sleep, after they had eaten such meat as they had with them, in a place where was a little grass for the horses to bite; for all the road hitherto had been mere grim stones and big rocks, walled on either side by stony screes, above which rose steep and beetling crags. ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... There was little light in the street, but the glow from the window of a Court perruquier was sufficient to reveal the features. Lovel saw a gigantic face, with a chin so long that the mouth seemed to be only half-way down it. Small eyes, red and fiery, were set deep under a beetling forehead. The skin was a dark purple, and the wig framing it was so white and fleecy that the man had the appearance of a malevolent ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... and brushed down smoothly, a large, ragged, sandy beard and coarse, sketchy features. His nose was large and thick with a bulbous end, and inclined to a reddish purple, a tint which extended to the adjacent parts of his face as if the colour had run. His eyebrows were large and beetling, overhanging deep-set eyes, and he wore a pair of spectacles which gave him a somewhat owlish expression. His exterior was unprepossessing, and I was in a state of mind that rendered me easily receptive of an ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... the buildings were only on one side—on the other there was a wondrous sense of openness, vastness, freshness—something level, gray, but dazzling; and before she could look again, the horses stopped, and close to her, under the beetling, weather-stained white cliff, was a low fence, and within it a verandah and a door, where stood Flora's maid, Barbara, ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the lunar mountains lie in long, massive chains, with towering peaks, profound gorges, narrow valleys, vast amphitheaters, and beetling precipices. Looking at them with a powerful telescope, the observer might well fancy himself to be gazing down from an immense height into the heart of the untraveled Himalayas. But these, imposing though they are, do not constitute the most ...
— Other Worlds - Their Nature, Possibilities and Habitability in the Light of the Latest Discoveries • Garrett P. Serviss
... the spray from which dashed over the boat, wetting me thoroughly, and making me feel pinched, blear-eyed, and miserable. I even envied the seals I saw cosily asleep in dry, sandy caves, at the foot of the black and beetling rocks. ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... done fourteen years before, advancing down the pass by which alone they could approach us with a small portion of my force, and stationing the remainder in two equal companies upon either brow of the beetling cliffs that overhung the road, having command to overwhelm the Spaniards with rocks, hurled upon them from above, so soon as I should give the signal by flying before them down the pass. Other measures I took also, for seeing that do what I would it well might happen that we ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... grow In due proportion, no gaze however keen Of these our eyes hath watched and known. No more Can we observe what's lost at any time, When things wax old with eld and foul decay, Or when salt seas eat under beetling crags. Thus Nature ever by unseen ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... on a hot Summer's day Where it gurgles and gushes, then flows on its way With a ripple as sweet as the music that died When the tones of loved voices are to us denied, And mirrored my face in the "Medical Spring," Where the beetling old cliffs their cool ...
— The Old Hanging Fork and Other Poems • George W. Doneghy
... I don't know—that's hazardous. Nevertheless, if she were placed on a beetling cliff, overhanging the tempestuous ocean, lashing the rocks with its wild surge; of a sudden, after she has been permitted to finish her soliloquy, a white cloud rising rapidly and unnoticed—the sudden ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat
... scarcely distinguishable, and forms, deprived of half their detail, gain in majesty and size. The mountains seem greater far by night than day—higher heights and deeper depths, more snowy pyramids, more beetling crags, softer meadows, and darker pines. The whole valley is hushed, but for the torrent and the chirping grasshopper and the striking of the village clocks. The black tower and the houses of Courmayeur ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... of the Grassy Quarry, as it was called, she peered under the little beetling cliff that overhung the well-known ledge on which ...
— The Dead Boxer - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... Or on some beetling cliff—where the mad waves Rush echoing thro' the high-arched caves below, I view some love-reft fair Whose sighing warms the air, Gaze anxious on the ocean as it raves And call on thee-alone, of power to ...
— Zophiel - A Poem • Maria Gowen Brooks
... in Council Bluffs, so celebrated for the grandeur of its location at the foot of the beetling bluffs of the Missouri River, and for its flourishing and progressive spirit, aside from which it holds a place in our historic annals dating back to aboriginal days. When this century was in its early infancy, and the shadowy dawn of our young nation was still ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... instinctive dislike and suspicion swept over me. He was, indeed, an ill-looking fellow enough. A broad, lozenge-shaped Tartar face, with great cheekbones and massive jaws; a low forehead surmounted by a dense brush of up-standing grayish-brown hair; beetling brows and eyes deep-set, fierce and furtive; combined to make a sufficiently unprepossessing countenance. Nor was his manner more pleasing. He scowled forbiddingly at me, he scrutinized the other customer, craning sideways to survey him in the mirror, he looked about the shop and he ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... trembling; naked birk Down showering her dishevelled hair, And like a beauty yielding up Her fate to all the elements, Had swayed in answer; hazels close, Thick brambles and dark brushwood tufts, And briared brakes that line the dells With shaggy beetling brows, had sung Shrill music, while the tattered flaws Tore over them, and now the whole Tumultuous concords, seized at once With savage inspiration,—pine, And larch, and beech, and fir, and thorn, And ash, and oak, and oakling, rave And shriek, and shout, and whirl, and toss, And stretch ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the Clove is the South Mountain, from whose beetling crags are obtained some of the finest views offered by the Catskills; then follows the Pine Orchard, where are the well-known Mountain House, the twin lakes, and the Laurel House at the head of the Kauterskill Falls; ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... here!" Charlie cried in alarm. But beetling cliffs reared behind the beach and although they ran frantically along at the edge of the green sand, they could find no way to scale the cliffs. The pirate ship came closer ...
— A World Called Crimson • Darius John Granger
... on the southern side, there are numerous rivers, sometimes of considerable size, which find their way to the Sylhet plains through very deep valleys, the rivers flowing through narrow channels flanked by beetling cliffs which rise to considerable altitudes. The scenery in the neighbourhood of these beautiful rivers is of the most romantic description, and the traveller might imagine himself in Switzerland were it not for the absence of the snowy ranges. Of such a description is the scenery on the banks of ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... overhanging cliffs that almost shut out the sky; the path is rough and set with sharp pebbles; it is narrow, winding, steep; often it seems to be barred by some huge rock that juts across it, and there is barely room for the broken ledge yielding slippery footing between the beetling crag above and the steep slope beneath that dips so quickly to the black torrent below. All is gloomy, damp, hard; and if we look upwards the glen becomes more savage as it rises, and armed foes hold the very throat of the pass. But, however long, however barren, however ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... attempt in the same direction; and, with high hopes for the result, Mysie, still accompanied by Clarissa, proceeded to another portion of the cliffs, where a low, wedge-shaped promontory, shadowed by beetling crags, was, as Mr. F. confidently stated, "sure ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... Few men could shuffle along more inoffensively or cry "Old Clo'" with a meeker twitter than Sleepy Sol. The old man crawled one day, bowed with humility and clo'-bag, into a military mews and uttered his tremulous chirp. To him came one of the hostlers with insolent beetling brow. ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... looked out of tender blue eyes shaded by golden hair, probably the grief and love she felt would have shown themselves only in bursts of feeling most graceful to see, and engaging the sympathy of all; but this same soul, imprisoned in a dry, angular body, stiff and old, and looking out under beetling eyebrows, over withered high cheek-bones, could only utter itself by a passionate tempest—unlovely utterance of a lovely impulse—dear only to Him who sees with a Father's heart the real beauty of spirits. It is ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... had visited the asbestos claims, where the edge of a blanket formation of the rock known as serpentine, containing the asbestos, lay exposed to view, twisting around the head of narrow canyons, and under beetling cliffs. We went halfway up the north rim trail, through Shinumo and White canyons, our objective point on these trips being a narrow box canyon which contained a large boulder, rolled from the walls above, and wedged in the flume-like gorge far above ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... way could have lain straight and open before them, even though it bristled with beasts and foes! But for the whole distance it screwed itself into a succession of crescent-shaped beaches, each one lying between rocky spurs of the beetling crags. ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... a scathed stump that shot out from a shattered pinnacle of rock that overhung us, with its glossy skin, glancing like the brazen serpent set up by Moses in the camp of the Israelites; and the cattle on the beetling summit of the cliff craned over the precipitous ledge to look down upon us; and while every thing around us and above us was thus glancing in the blue and ghastly radiance, the band struck up a low moaning air; the light burnt out, and once more we were ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... mountain after mountain, and still I behold peaks soaring far above, crowned with the snow that never melts. I stand upon beetling cliffs, and look into chasms that yawn beneath, sleeping in the silence of desolation. Great fragments have fallen into them, and lie piled one upon another. Others hang threatening over, as if waiting for some concussion of the atmosphere to hurl them from their balance. Dark precipices frown ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... I'm told she sits looking on her lap, under the beetling shade, until she hears an order for tinctures or powders, or a mixture that strikes her fancy. It's possible to do more suicidal things than sit the afternoons in a chemist's shop and see poor creatures get ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and held by the persons beneath, might serve by way of gy, as Mucklebackit expressed it, to render its descent in some measure steady and regular. Still, to commit one's self in such a vehicle, through a howling tempest of wind and rain, with a beetling precipice above and a raging abyss below, required that courage which despair alone can inspire. Yet, wild as the sounds and sights of danger were, both above, beneath, and around, and doubtful and dangerous as the mode of escaping appeared to be, Lovel and the ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... pipe, and he snaps its neck— Would speak, though he coughs instead, Then paces the porch like a quarter-deck With a reeling mast o'erhead! Ho! the old sea captain's cheeks glow warm, And his eyes gleam grim and weird, As he mutters about, like a thunder-storm, In the cloud of his beetling beard. ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... horseshoe-wise, encircling the peninsula of Iges with a ribbon of pale silver, and at the northern extremity of the loop was distinctly visible the narrow road of the Saint-Albert pass, winding between the river bank and a beetling, overhanging hill that was crowned with the little wood of Seugnon, an offshoot of the forest of la Falizette. At the summit of the hill, at the carrefour of la Maison-Rouge, the road from Donchery to Vrigne-aux-Bois debouched into ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... his word She knelt, and unto God, with help of God, Uprushed the strength of prayer, as when the cloud Uprushes past some beetling mountain wall From billowy deeps unseen. Long time she prayed; While heaven and earth grew silent as that night When rose the Saviour. Sudden ceased the prayer: And rang upon the night her jubilant cry, "I saw a Sign in Heaven. Far inward rolled The gates; and glory ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... It was stupid, but it had a strong will and possession, and stood on that to the last. The judge had a task beyond his preparation, yet his position remained real; he was there to represent a great reality, the justice of states, which we could well enough see beetling over his head, and which his trifling talk nowise affected, and did not impede, since he ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... of the Hittites as well as of the northern Amorites, the Mitannians, and the Kassites; and he led the Aryans from the Iranian steppes towards the verdurous valley of the Punjab. His worshippers engraved his image with grateful hands on the beetling cliffs of Cappadocian chasms in Asia Minor, where his sway was steadfast and pre-eminent for long centuries. In one locality he appears mounted on a bull wearing a fringed and belted tunic with short sleeves, a conical helmet, and upturned shoes, while he grasps in one hand the lightning symbol, ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... degrees of care, according to the ground.6 Sometimes it crossed smooth and level valleys, which offered of themselves little impediment to the traveller; at other times, it followed the course of a mountain stream that wound round the base of some beetling cliff, leaving small space for the foothold; at others, again, where the sierra was so precipitous that it seemed to preclude all further progress, the road, accommodated to the natural sinuosities of the ground, wound round the heights which it would ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... myself glide over the edge of the cliff, and the next moment hung in empty space. After being lowered about eighty feet, I found myself on a level with the crevice before mentioned, and gave the preconcerted signal for arresting my downward progress. Owing, however, to a beetling crag or boulder which overhung the recess, I was still at a distance of ten or twelve feet horizontally from the goal. Fixing the boathook into a convenient indentation of the rock, I gradually pulled myself in till I reached the face of the wall. Then leaving the plank, I crawled up ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... Trinity, to the right or to the left, in front or in the rear, but dense, motionless, snowy mist; a spectral image of that deluge-wrath which, as it rose to sweep o'er earth, once broke against these stern, steep cliffs and beetling peaks of rock: no trace is to be seen of the buried valley, for the ghostly waves of the cold, white sea of foam shroud it closely in their stifling veils; the glowing face of the crimson sun shines not as yet upon earth's winding sheet of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... plunging down, headlong, some eighty feet in search of it. With its picturesque Temple of the Sibyl, perched high on a crag; its minor waterfalls glancing and sparkling in the sun; and one good cavern yawning darkly, where the river takes a fearful plunge and shoots on, low down under beetling rocks. There, too, is the Villa d'Este, deserted and decaying among groves of melancholy pine and cypress trees, where it seems to lie in state. Then, there is Frascati, and, on the steep above it, the ruins of Tusculum, where ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... completely covered hill and gorge as far as the vision could range but they could not see far, for at every fresh burst of the furious wind the restless wreaths were gathered up and whirled madly to the sky, or swept wildly down the valleys, or dashed with fury against black precipices and beetling cliffs, to which they would sometimes cling for a few seconds, then, falling away, would be caught up again by the tormenting gale, and driven along in some ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... landed from France; and in the background, Edinburgh half veiled in an autumn fog, lying at the foot of its semicircle of hills—the grim couchant lion of Arthur's seat; Salisbury Crags, grey and beetling; the heatherly slopes of the Pentlands in the distance. A little after eight her Majesty landed at Granton Pier, amidst the cheers of her Scotch subjects. The Duke of Buccleugh, whose public-spirited work the pier was, stood there to receive his sovereign, when she ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... increasing blast roar'd round the beetling rocks, The clouds swift-wing'd flew o'er the starry sky, The groaning trees untimely shed their locks, And shooting meteors caught the ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... in thoughtful mood not untinged with vague repinings, my footsteps carried me, unwittingly as it were, to that beetling promontory from which our peaceful hamlet derives its name. For long I stood upon the crest of that craggy eminence wherefrom, so tradition tells us, a noble young chieftain of the aborigines who once populated this locality, being despairful of winning ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... mill-horse under compulsion of collar and whip; but in that fighting- time that followed, all was hope: 'the rebels' at least felt themselves strong enough to build up the world again from its dry bones,—and they did it, too!" said the old man, his eyes glittering under his beetling brows. He went on: "And their opponents at least and at last learned something about the reality of life, and its sorrows, which they—their class, I mean—had once known nothing of. In short, the two combatants, the workman and the gentleman, ...
— News from Nowhere - or An Epoch of Rest, being some chapters from A Utopian Romance • William Morris
... his feet, and his eyes, snapping open, saw an alien land. It was a land of somber color, with great gray moors, and beetling black cliffs. There was something queer about it, an intangible quality that ...
— Hellhounds of the Cosmos • Clifford Donald Simak
... car drew up in front of one of those few old-fashioned, brownstone, English-basement residences which to-day survive on Fifth Avenue below Fifty-ninth Street, elbowed, shouldered, and frowned down upon by beetling hives of trade. ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... both started and stared. For they had uncovered, not the beetling brow, Roman nose, and firm curved lip of the Ulysses of the middle age, but the face of a fair lad, with long straw-colored hair, and soft ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... and then slowly swept it upward again. This phenomenon of a cliff seemed beyond the comprehension of her sight. It looked a mile high. The few trees along its bold rampart resembled short spear-pointed bushes outlined against the steel gray of sky. Ledges, caves, seams, cracks, fissures, beetling red brows, yellow crumbling crags, benches of green growths and niches choked with brush, and bold points where single lonely pine trees grew perilously, and blank walls a thousand feet across their shadowed faces—these ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... James and Agatha, fell on a little camp near the spit of coast-land toward which they had struggled. The point lifted itself abruptly into a rocky bank which curved in and out, yielding to the besieging waves. Just here had been formed a little sandy cove partly protected by the beetling cliff. At the top was verdure in abundance. Vines hung down over the face of the wall, coarse grasses and underbrush grew to its very edge, and sharp-pointed fir trees etched themselves against the clear blue of the sky. Below, the white sand formed a sickle-shaped beach, bordered by the rocky ...
— The Stolen Singer • Martha Idell Fletcher Bellinger
... has come; lo the Sun! How I love the Sun that's on high; Below it swims Ka-wai-hoa, Oa the slope inclined from Lehua. 5 On Kauai met I a pali, A beetling cliff that bounds Milo-lii, And climbing up Makua-iki, Crawling up was Pua, the child, An orphan that weeps ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... Mountaineer's Bride' superbly, or," continued the little man, warming through the blue-black border of his face with professional enthusiasm, "it's enough to make a play itself. 'The Cot on the Crags.' Last scene—moonlight—the struggle on the ledge! The Lady of the Crags throws herself from the beetling heights!—A shriek from the depths—a ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... prize anon, The dusky warriors cheer them on. And often the limits are almost passed, As the swift ball flies and returns. At last It leaps the line at a single bound From the fair Wiwaste's sturdy arm Like a fawn that flies from the baying hound. The wild cheers broke like a thunder storm On the beetling bluffs and the hills profound, An echoing, jubilant sea of sound. Wakawa, the chief, and the loud acclaim Announced the end of the hard-won game, And the fair Wiwaste was ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... height there was no wind. The veil of cloud that hid the stars hung but a hand-breadth above the naked summit. To eastward the peak broke away sheer, beetling in a perpetual menace to the valleys and the lower hills. Just under the brow, on a splintered and creviced ledge, was the ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... noticed the exterior. Such a rambling old structure; such a beetling top to it, as if it had settled down here to brood over a mysterious past. I never see it, especially at twilight, that I don't wonder what lies so heavily upon its conscience. Is it a crime? There ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... the camp, stretched the cat out on a flat rock. And now that the animal lay in the full light of day, the sight of its ugly, beetling brow, thin, cruel lips and powerful teeth made each of the three boys feel rather thankful that he had not had the luck to come face to face with it ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Rockies • Frank Gee Patchin
... the usual contrariety of fate, Erskine appeared! He came striding along the platform, a big, loosely-built man, with a clean-shaven face, glancing to right and left over the upstanding collar of a tweed coat. He looked at once plain and distinguished, and in the quizzical eyes and beetling eyebrows there was an unmistakable likeness to the grande dame standing by Claire's side. Just for a moment he paused, as he came in sight of the group of passengers, and Claire, meeting his glance, knew who he was, even before he came forward and ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... probably suggested the theme of my visit to you this afternoon. I confess, I am a passionate man. Things of the senses appeal to me more than to most; it is, of course, the artist within me. I am like a mountain torrent or the beetling crest of an ocean comber rushing, full-bodied, down upon—upon—the floor." He came to a full stop and stared with pursed lips at the object of his love, sitting unhappily before him. What the devil do mountain torrents and ocean combers rush down upon? Nothing as domestic, surely, as a floor. ...
— Tutors' Lane • Wilmarth Lewis
... arms were too long and that his feet and hands were of an uncomely bigness. In face he was swarthy, with black hair and a black forked beard; his nose was big and very high in the bridge, and his eyes sunk deep under beetling eyebrows were very pale-coloured and very cruel and sinister. He had—and this I have ever remarked to be the sign of great virility in a man—a big, deep, rough voice, better suited to, and no doubt oftener employed ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... wonders of nature is often disappointing; but never can this be said of the blood-hued Rio Colorado. If it had beauty, it was beauty that appalled. So riveted was my gaze that I could hardly turn it across the river, where Emmett proudly pointed out his lonely home—an oasis set down amidst beetling red cliffs. How grateful to the eye was the green of alfalfa and cottonwood! Going round the bluff trail, the wheels had only a foot of room to spare; and the sheer descent into the red, ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... white farmhouses, and yellow with waving, corn. But he tarried not here, though many kind words were spoken to him, and all besought him to stay. Right onwards he went, until he reached the waste land which borders the sounding sea. And there high mountains stood, with snow-crowned crags beetling over the waves; and a great river, all foaming with the summer floods, went rolling through the valley. And in the deep dales between the mountains were rich meadows, green with grass, and speckled with thousands of flowers of every hue, where herds of cattle and deer, and noble elks, and untamed ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... But splendider in Saturn's, whose hoar locks Shone like the bubbling foam about a keel When the prow sweeps into a midnight cove. In pale and silver silence they remain'd, Till suddenly a splendour, like the morn, Pervaded all the beetling gloomy steeps, All the sad spaces of oblivion, And every gulf, and every chasm old, 360 And every height, and every sullen depth, Voiceless, or hoarse with loud tormented streams: And all the everlasting cataracts, And all the headlong ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... now lay down there was no wood, save low bushes, betwixt them and the rock-wall; and Walter noted that whereas otherwhere, save in one place whereto their eyes were turned, the cliffs seemed wellnigh or quite sheer, or indeed in some places beetling over, in that said place they fell away from each other on either side; and before this sinking was a slope or scree, that went gently up toward the sinking of the wall. Walter looked long and earnestly at this place, and spake ...
— The Wood Beyond the World • William Morris
... him whose coat of rags Has pressed at night her regal feet, Shall come the secrets, strange and sweet, Of century pines and beetling crags. ...
— Woodcraft • George W. Sears
... to the top of the first ridge, there being two to cross. The first consisted of a ridge of rocks running east and west from a superb sweep of snowy mountains to the north-west, which presented a chaotic scene of blue glacial ice and white snow, through which splintered rocks and beetling crags thrust their black heads. The view into the Kambachen gorge was magnificent, though it did not reveal the very bottom of the valley and its moraines: the black precipices of its opposite flank seemed to rise to the glaciers ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... still dangle from the grim house-fronts, were stretched across the street; thus enclosing and fettering a compact mass of combatants in an iron embrace, while from the rare and narrow murder-windows in the walls, and from the beetling roofs, descended the hail of iron and stone and scalding pitch and red-hot coals to refresh the struggling ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... down Before his feet, blazing with fearful flames. And Ares saw, and knew the stormy threat Of the mighty-thundering Father, and he stayed His eager feet, now on the very brink Of battle's turmoil. As when some huge crag Thrust from a beetling cliff-brow by the winds And torrent rains, or lightning-lance of Zeus, Leaps like a wild beast, and the mountain-glens Fling back their crashing echoes as it rolls In mad speed on, as with resistless swoop Of bound on bound it rushes down, until It cometh to the levels of the plain, And there ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... the move, and a deep spot having been found in the stream, they indulged in the luxury of a bath. That done they started on the march further into the heart of the forest. The hills were of great height, with bare crags often beetling up among the trees hundreds of feet, with deep valleys and rugged precipices. In crossing one of these valleys Nessus suddenly lifted ...
— The Young Carthaginian - A Story of The Times of Hannibal • G.A. Henty
... and the clear brooks were beginning to be hoarse with shivering floods, and the only flowers left were but widows of the sun, yet she had the sovereign comfort and the cheer of trustful love. Lord Auberley, though he cared nought for the Valley of Rocks or Watersmeet, for beetling majesty of the cliffs or mantled curves of Woody Bay, and though he accounted the land a wilderness and the inhabitants savages, had taken a favourable view of the ample spread of the inland farms and the loyalty of the tenants, which naturally suggested the raising of the rental. Therefore ...
— Frida, or, The Lover's Leap, A Legend Of The West Country - From "Slain By The Doones" By R. D. Blackmore • R. D. Blackmore
... for lack of breath, after his dramatic climax, the old philosopher lay back on his high-piled feather pillows and blinked out into the candle-light, puffed in silence for a few minutes, then made answer in his own quizzical way with a radiant smile from out under his beetling ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... was "a castle that stood beetling on a crag above the road," where smoke actually arose from a beacon-grate that thrust itself out "from a far-front tower." Such attractions were not to be passed, and up the winding way over two hundred feet they went, and over the small drawbridge, guarded by one groom and the ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... had imagined and of a different type. There was no smack of the circus ring about him, no swagger of the footlights; nor any hint of the emotional, gay temperament supposed to be the inheritance of southern blood. He was a saturnine, gnarled old Spaniard with lean jaws and beetling brows. His skin was like parchment. It clung to his bones and fell in heavy wrinkles in the hollows of his cheeks and about his mouth; and his dark eyes, fierce as a wild hawk's, were as brilliant and ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... ye come, ye come From the Sea-Mother's teeming home— Children of Tethys and the sire Who around Earth rolls, gyre on gyre, His sleepless ocean-tide! Look on me—shackled with what chain, Upon this chasm's beetling side I must my dismal ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... enough to make the attempt irresistibly fascinating; but it was the getting away again after the alarm had been given and all the enemy's searchlights had been turned upon us, when the excitement reached its height; for, of course, the moment that we were far enough away from the shelter of the beetling cliffs to enable the Russians to train their big guns upon us, they would open fire upon us for all that they were worth, and then it became a case of dodging the shells. It was then that our ingenuity was taxed to the very utmost, twisting and turning hither ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood |
