"Billow" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... preserved peace with all foreign states during the rage of this political tempest. Her attitude was morally sublime. The waves rose, and the hurricane raged around her, but she towered above the billow and the tempest, her crown bright with the glory which the sun of liberty shed upon it. The stranger who found a refuge and a home within her borders, might well offer to her the tribute which the poet Moore so gracefully inscribed upon the pedestal of her ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... silvery beach, a riband around the flowing hair of the sea, Where gleam the foam-flowers garlanded in multitudinous nebulous rings: Here, on the frontier of many worlds and the billow-rocked cradle of eternal sleep, No sound, no music, no silence that a wounded soul ...
— Sandhya - Songs of Twilight • Dhan Gopal Mukerji
... that nearly touched the huge anklets of green jade with which her two little bare feet were loaded, as if to help them to stand firm. And a soft broad band of gold ran right round her just below her lovely breast, that lay held in its gold cup like a great double billow made of the creamy lather of the sea, prevented from escaping as it swelled up by the delicious dam formed by the curve of her shoulders meeting the soft bulge of the upper part of her rounded arms, which came out from each side and seemed as ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... present hour recedes, As from the beach a billow backward rolls, And the great past, rich in ...
— A Wreath of Virginia Bay Leaves • James Barron Hope
... never behold the surf Lit by the sun into gold, Curl and glitter and gleam, In a ring-like billow rolled, But I think of another ring, A simple, delicate band, That in the night of our troth I placed on a ...
— Stories in Verse • Henry Abbey
... there, hour after hour, now flung aloft until the whole ocean to the limits of the horizon lay spread around us, anon sweeping down the back of some giant billow until it seemed that the boat was about to plunge to the ocean's bed, and the passage of every hour was marked by an increasing greyness and haggardness in the faces of my companions, while a more hopelessly despairing expression came into ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... and winter surprises them on the deep, but brings them not the sight of the wished-for shore. The awful voice of the storm howls through the rigging. The labouring masts seem straining from their base; the dismal sound of the pumps is heard; the ship leaps, as it were, madly from billow to billow; the ocean breaks, and settles with engulfing floods over the floating deck, and beats with deadening, shivering weight against ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 1 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Egerton Ryerson
... great shell of artificial matter went, a visible, misty wall, that curled forward, and wrapped itself around the Thessian ships with a motion of tremendous speed, yet deceptive, for it seemed to billow and flow. ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... for the space of the lightning's flash all the field of battle round which our company has uncertainly wandered since the morning. I saw a limitless gray plain, across whose width the wind seemed to be driving faint and thin waves of dust, pierced in places by a more pointed billow of smoke. ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... either side, a period of tense silence or blurred murmurings was ended by a second great surge of cheers from front to rear. We all cheered till we were hoarse. Again we peered and listened and questioned each other, again came a roar of cheering like a sea billow. Again and again alternated the half silence and the uproar. Before we learned what was happening or had happened word came from mouth to mouth that we were going on. The press in front of us gradually melted away, we were able to sidle into the roadway, ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... river itself, its waters stretch out joyous and splendid; the rising sun pours upon its breast a long streamlet of gold; the breeze covers it with scales; its eddies stretch themselves, and tremble like an awaking serpent, and, when the billow heaves them, you seem to see the striped flanks, the tawny cuirass of ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 4 (of 10) • Various
... monotonous roar Of the long-breaking surf, and all the sky Is gray with cloud, home-bound and dull, I try To time a simple legend to the sounds Of winds in the woods, and waves on pebbled bounds,— A song of breeze and billow, such as might Be sung by tired sea-painters, who at night Look from their hemlock camps, by quiet cove Or beach, moon-lighted, on the waves they love. (So hast thou looked, when level sunset lay On the calm bosom of some Eastern bay, And all the spray-moist ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... I found the weather overcast, the sea gray but calm. Hardly a billow. I hoped to encounter Captain Nemo there—would he come? I saw only the helmsman imprisoned in his glass-windowed pilothouse. Seated on the ledge furnished by the hull of the skiff, I inhaled the sea's salty ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... opposite bank of the Manzanares, a slimy shrunken stream usually that flows almost hidden under clothes lines where billow the undergarments of all Madrid, in certain lights you can recapture almost entire the silhouette of the city as Goya has drawn it again and again; clots of peeling stucco houses huddling up a flattened hill towards the dome of San Francisco El Grande, then an undulating ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... feareth Less upon the trusted oak, Mans the helm himself and jeereth At the wild wind's sportive stroke. Tighter now the sail he fastens, Fleeter o'er the water skims, Straight to westward fearless hastens, Goes where'er the billow swims. ...
— Fridthjof's Saga • Esaias Tegner
... first of the princes whom it held up conspicuously to the admiration of the world and he rode so gracefully and gallantly on the lofty crest that mankind have given him the credit of raising and sustaining the magnificent billow on which he was borne. How far we are to consider him as founding the monarchy, or the monarchy as raising and illustrating him, will appear more fully in the course of ...
— Cyrus the Great - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... appear that the cause of birds falling down to the ground, is not any rupture or division of the air causing a vacuum, but purely the actual stroke of the voice, which when carried up in a great mass and with violence, raises a sort of tempest and billow, as it were, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... Every billow buried the base of the point in snowy foam and sent the spray flying far up its rugged front. Using the utmost caution, the boys descended to the limit of safety. At the next ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... scanty remains of the almost mythical Etruscan city of Veii, the Troy of Italy. The view in this direction is bounded by the advanced guard of the Sabine range, the blue peak of Soracte looking, as Lord Byron graphically says, like the crest of a billow about to break. In front, at your feet, is the city, broken up into the most picturesque masses by the irregularity of the ground; here and there a brighter light glistening on some stately campanile or cupola, and flashing back from ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... I knew there could not be many hours more of daylight, upon rising to the summit of a great billow, I beheld something riding the seas not far ahead. For some reason I had not seen the bulk of this strange apparition before and at first I was sure it was the turtle-turned ...
— Swept Out to Sea - Clint Webb Among the Whalers • W. Bertram Foster
... Freshwater Bay affords a delightful retreat. During the bright days of summer the sea breaks in gentle murmur on the sand and shingle of the beach, but in winter when lashed by S.W. Gales "it tumbles a billow on chalk and sand." The roar of the ocean can be heard for miles inland. The esplanade shown in the picture has been destroyed by the breakers. Temporary repairs have been effected, but a fierce controversy is still raging as to the ultimate solution of the question, how ...
— Pictures in Colour of the Isle of Wight • Various
... wanderer to her farthest verge;— If these on all some transient hours bestow Of rapture tingling with its hectic glow, Then all are poets; and if earth had rolled Her myriad centuries, and her doom were told, Each moaning billow of her shoreless wave Would wail its requiem o'er a ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... over the salt sea-billow I sailed: yet dared not look upon the shape Of him who ruled the helm, although the pillow 1380 For my light head was hollowed in his lap, And my bare limbs his mantle did enwrap, Fearing it was a ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... the cunningly-wrought chest the raging blast and the stirred billow and terror fell upon her, with tearful cheeks she cast her arm around Perseus and spake, 'Alas, my child, what sorrow is mine! But thou slumberest, in baby-wise sleeping in this woeful ark; midst ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... was working with great enthusiasm upon the draft of a connected essay, and was delighted one day to receive a visit from the novelist and Tieckian scholar, Eduard von Billow (the father of my young friend Billow), who was passing through Zurich. In my tiny little room I read him my chapter on poetry, and could not help noticing that he was greatly startled at my ideas on literary drama and on the advent of the new Shakespeare. I thought this ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... most part we ran East Southeast all along the shoare, within two leagues alwayes of the same, and found the land all as at the first, ful of woods and great rocks hard aboord the shoare, and the billow beating so sore, that the seas brake vpon the shoare as white as snow, and the water mounted so high that a man might easily discerne it 4. leagues off, in such wise that no boate could land there. Thus we ran vntil 12. of the clocke, and then they tooke the Sunne and after iudged themselues ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of - The English Nation, Vol. 11 • Richard Hakluyt
... we hollow'd his narrow bed And smooth'd down his lonely pillow, That the foe and the stranger would tread o'er his head, And we far away on the billow! ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... seek them where the surges sweep Their burthen round Sigaeum's steep And cast on Lemnos' shore: The sea-birds shriek above the prey, O'er which their hungry beaks delay,[hc] As shaken on his restless pillow, His head heaves with the heaving billow; That hand, whose motion is not life,[hd] Yet feebly seems to menace strife, 1090 Flung by the tossing tide on high, Then levelled with the wave—[184] What recks it, though that corse shall lie Within a living grave? ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... bosoms, and nothing escaped them: for them the nightingale was singing, the stars were shining, and the trees were softly whispering, lulled both by slumber and by the softness of the summer, and by the warmth. Lavretzky surrendered himself wholly to the billow which was bearing him onward,—and rejoiced; but no word can express that which took place in the young girl's pure soul: it was a secret to herself; so let it remain for all others. No one knows, no one has seen, ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... helpless bankruptcy, with the poor consolation that, though legally responsible, he was not morally bound to pay other people's debts. But Scott's own sanguine carelessness had been partly to blame for the Ballantyne failure; and he faced the billow as it suddenly appeared, bowed to it in grief but not in shame, and, while not pretending to any stoicism, instantly resolved to devote the remainder of his life to the repayment ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... Cathedral was glowing with a reddish yellow light. This billow of candles which crossed it illuminated the lower arches of the side-aisles, the depth of the chapels, and glittered upon the glass of some shrine or upon the gold of some tabernacle. The rays even penetrated into the apse, and the sepulchral ...
— The Dream • Emile Zola
... dome of the sky fills with a lighter azure; the star swoons, and the sun peers over the crest. It ascends. Its rays plunge into the pool of darkness still upon the meadow; they pierce it, at first separately as with rapier thrusts, and then finally billow down into it in a cascade of molten gold. The shadows flee; the sunlight strikes the cabin; and Charles-Norton ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... nearer to the shore, and sometimes carried farther off; sometimes buried in the surge, and then rising again, as if itself struggling like the almost hopeless sufferer it supports, who looks sadly to the shore as he rises from every wave, and battling with the billow, mingles his cry for help with the wild, mournful scream of the sea-bird; nature in every bosom on the shore is instinct with anxious pity for his fate, and darts her sympathies to him over the laboring waters. The child drops his play-things, and old age grasps its crutch and hurries to the ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various
... strikes full on the sail and raises the waves up to heaven. The oars are snapped; the prow swings away and gives her side to the waves; down in a heap comes a broken mountain of water. These hang on the wave's ridge; to these the yawning billow shows ground amid the surge, where the sea churns with sand. Three ships the south wind catches and hurls on hidden rocks, rocks amid the waves which Italians call the Altars, a vast reef banking ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... with the harmony external to it in a larger unity. When I glance out upon a winter twilight drenching earth and sky with luminous blue, a sudden delight floods in upon me, gathering up all my senses in a surging billow of emotion, and my being pulses and vibrates in a beat of joy. Something within me goes out to meet the landscape; so far as I am at all conscious of the moment, I feel, There, that is what I am! This deep harmony of tone and mass is the expression of a ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... and mounted. So did the dance. Wave followed on ripple, sea on wave, and on the sea the foaming, far-flung billow. Limb after limb, the whole supple body of the blind dancer came into play; yet there was no visible tension. Never dead, never hard, but limp,—as limp as flowing, rushing water,—she whirled and swayed through ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... world flowed under us: the hills Billow on billow of umbrageous green Heaved us, aghast, to fresh horizons, seen One rapturous instant, blind with flash of rills And silver-rising storms and dewy stills Of dripping boulders, till the dim ravine Drowned us again in leafage, whose serene Coverts ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... of sound That the wind shakes from the forest. I bathe in the liquid shade Under the pines, where the air hangs cool After the shower is done. My saucy little friend the squirrel Flips my shoulder with his tail, Leaps from leafy billow to leafy billow, Returns to eat his breakfast from my hand. Between us there is glad sympathy; He gambols; my pulses dance; I am exultingly full of ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... west wind going on his way sung his wild chant amongst the cordage, and rushed among the sails as with a rush of wings. The ship leant over like a maiden shrinking from a kiss, then, shivering, fled away, leaping from billow to billow as they rose and tossed their white arms about her, fain to drag her down and hold her to ocean's ...
— Mr. Meeson's Will • H. Rider Haggard
... there on the sky-line, in the north-east this time, another column of smoke was lifting its first billow over the tree-tops. "Oh, Dick!" she exclaimed, in beautiful alarm, "what does ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... worthy gentleman of Ephesus, and a most skilful physician, was standing by the sea-side, his servants brought to him a chest, which they said the sea-waves had thrown on the land. 'I never saw,' said one of them, 'so huge a billow as cast it on our shore.' Cerimon ordered the chest to be conveyed to his own house and when it was opened he beheld with wonder the body of a young and lovely lady; and the sweet-smelling spices and rich casket of jewels made him conclude it was some great person who was thus strangely entombed: ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... Now I am a fair swimmer, so I swam the whole day till nightfall, when my forearms and shoulders were numbed with fatigue and I felt like to die; so I testified to my faith, expecting naught but death. The sea was still surging under the violence of the winds, and presently there came a billow like a hillock; and, bearing me up high in air, threw me with a long cast on dry land, that His will might be fulfilled. I crawled up the beach and doffing my raiment wrung it out to dry and spread it in the sunshine: then I lay me down and slept ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... die," he groaned, as each heaving billow seemed to torture his poor stomach. He rose at dawn and found himself unable to stand. The sea was rough, and the ship was tossing and reeling like a drunken man. John found himself unable to lie down or sit up. He spent the day in rolling alternately in his berth or on the floor, ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... wearied mariner to port e'er fled From the dark billow, when some tempest's nigh, As from tumultuous gloomy thoughts I fly— Thoughts by the force of goading passion bred: Nor wrathful glance of heaven so surely sped Destruction to man's sight, as does that eye Within whose bright black orb Love's Deity Sharpens each dart, and tips with gold ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... a red flame, as if the sun had glanced on a billow, lighted the spot for an instant; but the Feather of Flames, Wassamo of the Fire-Plume, had disappeared from home and kindred, and the familiar paths of ...
— The Indian Fairy Book - From the Original Legends • Cornelius Mathews
... never been known on the southern coast. From our hotel windows the sea view was all banked in haze, with a little rain-swept half-circle under our very eyes, churned and lashed into one tossing stretch of foam. So heavy was the wind upon the waves that little sea could rise, for the crest of each billow was torn shrieking from it, and lashed broadcast over the bay. Clouds, wind, sea, all were rushing to the west, and there, looking down at this mad jumble of elements, I waited on day after day, my sole companion a white, silent woman, with terror in her eyes, her forehead ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Downs. Coming ashore later, on a giant roller, the wave burst into awful masses of towering foam, so high above and around the lugger that for an instant she was out of sight, overwhelmed, and the crowds cried, 'She's lost!' but upwards she rose again on the crest of the following billow, and with the speed of an arrow flew to the land ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor
... but, raising The window, stood, moon-gazing, In fairyland a guest; "On such a night," et cetera— See Shakespeare for much better a Description of the rest,— I mused, how sweet to wander Beside the river, yonder; And then the sudden whim Seized my head to pillow On Hudson's sparkling billow, ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... a stiff piece of work reaching her, for wind and waves were both against us and rowing difficult; the cutter at one moment being on the top of a mountainous billow and the next plunged deep down into a yawning valley of green water, the broken ridges of which curled over our gunwales on either hand, threatening to overwhelm us till we, rose again ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... washed her nose in a curving billow that came inboard and swept aft. With her small area of exposed sail and with the wind buffeting her, she had halted and paid off, lacking steerageway. She got several wallops of the same sort before she had gathered herself enough to head ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... nothing short of a miracle could save the remainder of the houses. Other stout fellows were upon the roofs with their buckets, emptying them as fast as they were filled upon the roofs and walls, so that when burning fragments and showers of sparks or even a leaping billow of flame smote upon them, it hissed like a live thing repulsed, and died away in smoke ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... splendid thing is being revealed? But no; it means: "Answering spake unto her great glittering-helmeted Hector;" or tout simplement, 'Hector answered.' And hardly can anyone open his lips, but it must be brought in with some variation of that sea-riding billow, or ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... inforcement of the laws, 245 That he may rule us as a monarch ought.[8] With such authority the troubled host He sway'd; they, quitting camp and fleet again Rush'd back to council; deafening was the sound As when a billow of the boisterous deep 250 Some broad beach dashes, and the Ocean roars. The host all seated, and the benches fill'd, Thersites only of loquacious tongue Ungovern'd, clamor'd mutinous; a wretch Of utterance prompt, but in coarse phrase obscene 255 Deep learn'd alone, with ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... away upon its mission like a feather—for in the delight of the music the curate never felt the arms that urged it swiftly along. After him it came pursuing, and wafted him mightily on. Over the brown waters it went rolling, a grand billow of innumerable involving and involved waves. He thought of the spirit of God that moved on the face of the primeval waters, and out of a chaos wrought a cosmos. "Would," he said to himself, "that ...
— Paul Faber, Surgeon • George MacDonald
... beneath it. Then the soft voice of Undine was heard through the uproar; the moon emerged from the clouds; and by its light Undine was seen on the heights above the valley. She rebuked, she threatened the floods below her. The menacing and tower-like billow vanished, muttering and murmuring; the waters gently flowed away under the beams of the moon; while Undine, like a hovering white dove, flew down from the hill, raised the knight and Bertalda, and bore them to a green ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... their footsteps lead them where the bobolink sings as he circles over a green meadow, and the blue water lilies stoop to kiss the brook that ripples through it; or where the fields of grain bend and billow in the summer breeze; or the old mill-wheel splashes, while the white flowers in the pond above smile in the sunlight. If the patient reader will but follow their lives a little further, only ...
— Pocket Island - A Story of Country Life in New England • Charles Clark Munn
... wave came down abeam, and fell on the vessel's quarter. There is always in storms a tiger-like wave, a billow fierce and decisive, which, attaining a certain height, creeps horizontally over the surface of the waters for a time, then rises, roars, rages, and falling on the distressed vessel tears it ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... took out a large parcel, done up in brown paper. Miss Arabella took it tenderly, and for a few moments lay smoothing it gently. Then, slowly and tremblingly, she untied the string and let a billow of sky-blue silk ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... away, the homesick seaman's hoard, Thy fragrant tokens live, Like flower-leaves in a previous volume stored, To solace and relieve Some heart too weary of the restless world; Or like thy Sabbath Cross, That o'er this brightening billow streams unfurled, Whatever ...
— The Christian Year • Rev. John Keble
... nature. I love great plains too, but I like them best because they are like the sea when they billow under the breeze." ...
— The Idol of Paris • Sarah Bernhardt
... was the stern Picton himself who spoke. The Eighty-eighth now led the pursuit, and sprang from rock to rock in all the mad impetuosity of battle; and like some mighty billow rolling before the gale, the ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... heart-pangs, Bedell dallied with death more closely than ever. He had let his skiff drift far down toward the Falls. Often he could see the wide smooth curve where the green volume first lapses vastly on a lazy slope, to shoulder up below as a huge calm billow, before pitching into the madness of waves whose confusion of tossing and tortured crests hurries to the abyss. The afternoon grew toward evening before he pulled steadily home, crawling away from the roarers against the cruel green, watching the ominous cloud ...
— Old Man Savarin and Other Stories • Edward William Thomson
... completely submerged by it. The lonely Opara Isle, where the steamers which run between Panama and New Zealand have their coaling station, was visited at about half-past eleven in the evening by a billow which swept away a portion of the coal depot. Afterward great waves came rolling in at intervals of about twenty minutes, and several days elapsed before the sea resumed its ordinary ebb ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... 140 And tear the vessel, till the mariners, Appalled, turn their despairing eyes on me, As the Phenicians did on Jonah, then Cast me out from amongst them, as an offering To appease the waves. The billow which destroys me Will be more merciful than man, and bear me Dead, but still bear me to a native grave, From fishers' hands, upon the desolate strand, Which, of its thousand wrecks, hath ne'er received One lacerated ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... of three servants and A tutor, the licentiate Pedrillo, Who several languages did understand, But now lay sick and speechless on his pillow And, rocking in his hammock, longed for land, His headache being increased by every billow; And the waves oozing through the port-hole made His berth a little ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... gallant fight, In nought entire — except his heart. 70 Mute for a while, and sullenly distress'd, At last the impetuous sorrow fir'd his breast. 'Wild is the whirlwind rolling O'er Afric's sandy plain, And wild the tempest howling 75 Along the billow'd main: But every danger felt before — The raging deep, the whirlwind's roar — Less dreadful struck me with dismay, Than what I feel this fatal day. 80 Oh, let me fly a land that spurns the brave, Oswego's dreary shores shall be my grave; I'll seek ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... ceased its roar, for however calm the weather might be, there is always a gentle swaying motion in the great Pacific, which, although scarce noticeable out at sea, reaches the shore at last in a huge billow. The water within the lagoon, as before said, was perfectly still. There were three narrow openings in the reef: one opposite each end of the valley which I have described as crossing the island; the other opposite our own valley, which we afterwards ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... it was nearly a mile wide. It sloped perceptibly toward the southern edge, giving all the earth the appearance of a heavy list. Toward the west the ground continued level for a thousand yards, but then a high, sloping, grassy hill went right across the ridge from side to side, like a vast billow on the verge of breaking. It shut out all further view beyond. The whole crest of this hill, from one end to the other, was crowned by a long row of enormous stone posts, shining brightly in the moonlight against a background ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... music which comes floating by us on the wings of night and silence, and which we rather feel than hear—like the exhalation of the violet dying even upon the sense it charms—like the snow-flake dissolved in air before it has caught a stain of earth—like the light surf severed from the billow, which a breath disperses—such is the character of Ophelia: so exquisitely delicate, it seems as if a touch would profane it; so sanctified in our thoughts by the last and worst of human woes, that we scarcely ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... it. There is something stately and wonderful about standing rye, when one is close enough to see the individual stalks. They are so tall and slim that you cannot understand why the lightest wind does not lay them flat. Yet all day long they sway and ripple and billow in the summer wind, and unless the heavy, driving storm comes the ranks remain unbroken to the last and face the sickle in golden ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... for a rocky bluff. A gush of flame from its underjets and it shouldered heavily upward, just missing the jagged crest. A gout of fire forward, another, and it went into a long flat glide, following the fall of a foothill to the plain beyond. It held course and reduced speed, letting the ground billow up to it rather than descending. There was a moment of almost-flight, almost-sliding, and then a rush of dust and smoke which over-took and passed them. When it cleared, they were part of the plain, part of ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn
... one of those overwhelming seas which even the inexperienced perceive to be irresistible, roared after the disabled vessel. As it reached her she struck again. The billow made a clean sweep over her. Everything was carried away. The boat was overturned, the stout painter snapped, and the crew left struggling in ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne
... cause, so fair she was, and he now come far into his eighteenth year. She was that day clad all in black, without any adornment, and her hair was knit up as a crown about her beauteous head, which sat upon her shoulders as the swan upon the billow: her hair had darkened since the days of her childhood, and was now brown mingled with gold, as though the sun were within it; somewhat low it came down upon her forehead, which was broad and white; her eyes were blue-grey and lustrous, her cheeks a little hollow, but the jaw was truly ...
— The Sundering Flood • William Morris
... snatch, if possible, a few minutes sleep. He had been in his cabin only long enough to change his damp clothing for dry, when a fearful crash told him the ship had struck upon the rocks. In a moment he was back on the quarter deck. He found that a surging billow had struck the hinder part of the ship, tore off part of the sheathing, and carried away the watch-house in which two women were sleeping—all efforts to rescue them were in vain. Whilst the storm-tossed ocean raged and foamed around the devoted ship, ...
— Hair Breadth Escapes - Perilous incidents in the lives of sailors and travelers - in Japan, Cuba, East Indies, etc., etc. • T. S. Arthur
... stormy weather, That night we went to the icy Pole, And there on the rocks we stood together, And saw the ocean before us roll. No moon shone down on the hermit sea, No cheering beacon illumed the shore, No ship on the water, no light on the lea, No sound in the ear but the billow's roar! But the wave was bright, as if lit with pearls, And fearful things on its bosom played; Huge crakens circled in foamy whirls, As if the deep for their sport was made, And mighty whales through the crystal dashed, And upward sent the far glittering spray, Till ...
— Poems • Sam G. Goodrich
... rush of the victorious army could not be stopped! On its front line swept!—On, like the crest of an angry billow, crushing resistance from its path and leaving a ghastly wreck under ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... lips told it. She had been right in fearing the effect this knowledge would have upon him. It stung his pride, wounded his heart, and forever marred his faith in love and friendship. As the truth broke over him, cold and bitter as a billow of the sea, she saw gathering in his face the still white grief and indignation of an outraged spirit, suffering with all a woman's pain, with all a man's intensity of passion. His eye grew fiery and stern, ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... moves out of Keighley the country becomes stony; the trees are left behind, and there rises on all sides billow on billow of purple heather. The way is rough as the Pilgrim's Progress road to Paradise. These hillside moors are filled with springs that high up form rills, then brooks, then cascades or "becks," and along the Haworth road, wherever ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... monsters were creeping out of the foaming sea, the oars moving like their legs. With the second and the third reef the same process takes place as with the first; and now the fishermen spring into the water and drag the boats on shore, every succeeding billow helping and giving them a good lift until they are fairly out of the water. One false move on the outside of the reefs—one moment's delay, ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... mirtelo. Bile galo. Bilious gala. Bill (a/c) kalkulo. Bill (of exchange) kambio. Bill (beak) beko. Bill (posted up) afisxo. Bill-poster afisxisto. Billhook brancxhakileto. Billet (note) letereto. Billet (wood) sxtipo. Billiard-ball globo. Billiards bilardo. Billow ondego. Bin grenkesto. Bind ligi. Bind (books) bindi. Bind (together) kunligi. Bind (wounds) bandagxi. Bind-weed liano. Biography biografio. Biology biologio. Biped dupiedulo. Birch (tree) betulo. Bird birdo. Birth naskigxo. Birthday naskotago. Biscuit ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... burning, With wealth for you, If my bark, which bounded o'er foreign foam, Should be lost near home— Ah! what would you do?"— "So thou wert spared—I 'd bless the morrow, In want and sorrow, That left me you; And I 'd welcome thee from the wasting billow, This heart thy pillow— That ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... Master Varney," said Anthony Foster. "He that is head of a party is but a boat on a wave, that raises not itself, but is moved upward by the billow which ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... and it drizzled, it hiss'd and it whirl'd, And it bubbled like water when mingled with flame, And columns of foam to the heaven were hurl'd, And billow on billow tumultuously came; It seem'd that the womb of the ocean would bear Sea over ...
— The Song of Deirdra, King Byrge and his Brothers - and Other Ballads • Anonymous
... was moving blindly across the wind with a thin trailing edge behind it and a rolling billow of descending mist as its forefront. It rolled up to and across a concrete highway, watched by perspiring motor cops who had performed miracles in clearing a path for it among the horde of sightseeing cars. It swept on ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... — how deep! how deep! You may sound the sea where the corals sleep, Where never a billow hath rumbled or rolled — Depths still the deeper ...
— Poems: Patriotic, Religious, Miscellaneous • Abram J. Ryan, (Father Ryan)
... because the river ran wild here among the rocks, and because pack-outfits going into the southward mountains could not disturb him by fording at this point. Across the river rose the steep embankments that shut in Buffalo Prairie, and still beyond that the mountains, thick with timber rising billow on billow until trees looked like twigs, with gray rock and glistening snow shouldering the clouds above the last purple line. The cabin in which he had lived and worked for many weeks faced the river and the distant Saw Tooth Range, ...
— The Hunted Woman • James Oliver Curwood
... that baseless fabric of Prospero's air-vision. Of the Mitre Tavern nothing but the bare walls remain there; of London, of England, of the World, nothing but the bare walls remain; and these also decaying, (were they of adamant,) only slower. The mysterious River of Existence rushes on: a new Billow thereof has arrived, and lashes wildly as ever round the old embankments; but the former Billow with its loud, mad eddyings, where is it?—Where?—Now this Book of Boswell's, this is precisely a Revocation of the Edict of Destiny; so that Time shall not utterly, not so soon by several ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... beaten and tossed about by the tumultuous waters with a violence which threatened to dash her into fragments at every shock, and the sea now made a continual breach over her. The decks were repeatedly swept by the boiling ocean, and each billow snatched its victims to a watery grave. The unfortunate captain and his mate were among the first that perished. About thirty or forty passengers were standing upon the poop clinging to each other in hopeless agony, and occasionally uttering the most piteous ejaculations. Whilst trembling ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... reveal; The forests groan,—the heavy gale Shrieks out Creation's funeral wail. Hark! that loud tremendous roar! Ocean overleaps the shore, Pouring all his giant waves O'er the fated land of graves; Where his white-robed spirit glides, Death the advancing billow rides, And the mighty conqueror smiles In ...
— Enthusiasm and Other Poems • Susanna Moodie
... the storm-blasts blow, To thunder peal, to billow's flow, And shepherd's call from hamlet low, Replying straight; But thee nought answers ... Even ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... stared at her with round, blinking eyes. She drew off her cotton gloves and whipped her knee with them in awkward embarrassment. She had small, regular features of the kind that remain the same from childhood to old age, and her liver-colored hair rolled in a billow almost ...
— The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories • Margaret Collier Graham
... decent formalities of the occasion impelled him to make a hasty catch at his cap. As he removed it, an impish windgust snatched it away from his nerveless grasp and presented it to a large and hungry billow, which straightway swallowed it and retired with a hiss of acknowledgment ...
— Little Miss Grouch - A Narrative Based on the Log of Alexander Forsyth Smith's - Maiden Transatlantic Voyage • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... thee, my baby, the night is behind us, And black are the waters that sparkled so green. The moon, o'er the combers, looks downward to find us At rest in the hollows that rustle between. Where billow meets billow, there soft be thy pillow; Ah, weary wee flipperling, curl at thy ease! The storm shall not wake thee, nor shark overtake thee, Asleep in the ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling
... down the pilot rolled. Thrice round the billow whirled her, as she lay, Then whelmed below. Strewn here and there behold Arms, planks, lone swimmers in the surges grey, And treasures snatched from Trojan homes away. Now fail the ships wherein Achates ride And ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... ourselves with drinking-coconuts, while a cowboy rode a dozen miles to the nearest telephone and summoned a machine from town. The town itself we could see, the Lakanaii metropolis of Olokona, a smudge of smoke on the shore-line, as we looked down across the miles of cane-fields, the billow-wreathed reef-lines, and the blue haze of ocean to where the island of Oahu shimmered like a dim ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... we passed once more into broken water, and the perils of the start were repeated, with the aggravation that we were now across the wind instead of being head on. Wave after wave burst over us, and time after time, as we hung suspended on the crest of some great billow, it seemed as if we never could ...
— Parkhurst Boys - And Other Stories of School Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... Cross in splendor gleaming far and wide o'er pine-clad heath, While the flaming blade of battle slumbers in its golden sheath. And before the lowly Savior, e'en the rider of the sea, Sigurd, tamer of the billow, he hath bent the ...
— Christmas in Legend and Story - A Book for Boys and Girls • Elva S. Smith
... a Skiff on the Ocean tost, Now high, now low, with each Billow born, With her Rudder broke, and her Anchor lost, Deserted and all forlorn. While thus I lie rolling and tossing all Night, That Polly lies sporting on Seas of Delight! Revenge, Revenge, Revenge, Shall appease ...
— The Beggar's Opera • John Gay
... through the room. The panel that held the repeater-circuit of the Holden Educator bulged outward; jets of smoke lanced out of broken metal, bulged corners, holes and skirled into little clouds that drifted upward—trailing a flowing billow of thick, black, pungent smoke that reached the low ceiling and spread outward, fanwise, obscuring the ceiling ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... all this, watched the skipper scramble aboard again onto the submerged decks, and then vanish altogether in a great billow. ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... ne're shooke our Battlements: If it hath ruffiand so vpon the Sea, What ribbes of Oake, when Mountaines melt on them, Can hold the Morties. What shall we heare of this? 2 A Segregation of the Turkish Fleet: For do but stand vpon the Foaming Shore, The chidden Billow seemes to pelt the Clowds, The winde-shak'd-Surge, with high & monstrous Maine Seemes to cast water on the burning Beare, And quench the Guards of th' euer-fixed Pole: I neuer did like mollestation ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... stern. She had anchored between the Isle of Amber and the main land, within that chain of breakers which encircles the island, and which bar she had passed over, in a place where no vessel had ever gone before. She presented her head to the waves which rolled from the open sea; and as each billow rushed into the straits, the ship heaved, so that her keel was in air; and at the same moment her stern, plunging into the water, disappeared altogether, as if it were swallowed up by the surges. In this position, driven by the ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... let us rest on the oar, And vex not a billow that sighs to the shore:— For sacred the spot where the starry waves meet With the beach, where the breath of the citron is sweet. There's a spell on the waves that now waft us along To the last of our Muses, ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... lodged vpon an Iland, where wee had nothing in the world to eate but pottage of Sassafras leaues, the like whereof for a meate was neuer used before as I thinke. The broad sound wee had to passe the next day all fresh and fasting: that day the winde blew so strongly, and the billow so great, that there was no possibilitie of passage without sinking of our boates. This was vpon Easter eue, which was fasted very truely. Vpon Easter day in the morning the winde comming very calme, we entred ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt
... turning to look the daring assailant in the face, the rogue had pitched himself back into his cave. No sooner that, than a very bulldog of a billow would attack him in the face. The serenity with which the impertinent assault was borne was complete. It was but a puff of silvery dust, powdering his mane with fresher brightness. Nothing would be left of bull but a little froth of all the foam displayed in the fierce ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... bound with ropes to the masts—I saw this man, who had fixed himself to one with a cord that was not very strong, and who held his wife clasped in his arms, that the waters might not carry her away. At last there came one gigantic billow, whose power it seemed impossible to withstand; then I saw this man withdraw the support of his arm from the poor creature, who seemed anxious only to die with him, and use both his hands to clasp the pole which sustained him. She ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... both Indies together, yet, let him wander where he will, he carries his one only home along with him: that home is his hammock. "Born under a gun, and educated on the bowsprit," according to a phrase of his own, the man-of-war-man rolls round the world like a billow, ready to mix with any sea, or be sucked down to death in ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... heeds not the fiery cavalry charge, That sweeps like a billow on To death, oh, the bravest and saddest sight, That ...
— Poems • Marietta Holley
... heavy billow rears All its sea-length in green, hushed wall; But totters as the shore it nears, Foams to its fall; Where was its mark? on what vain quest Rose that great water ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... the old woman's shocked silence behind her. "You mustn't carry it in a pie plate, it's dangerous," Simone said to her child, but she could see Nina was in no danger. "How often have you done this?" She could feel her skirt and her hair billow ...
— The Putnam Tradition • Sonya Hess Dorman
... grieve, but not for loss of dirt— Once stainless, just because of what thou wert. Thus on thy banks I linger and reflect That, surely as all waterways connect, Forever flowing onward to the sea, Shall the great billow thy ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... you, and am going to have less, for I a)n going into Norfolk. I have stayed till I have not one acquaintance left: the next billow washes me last off the plank. I have not cared to stir, for fear of news from Flanders; but I have convinced myself that there will be none. Our army is much superior to the Count de Saxe; besides, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... sheets dashed over them,—the two. And constantly the boat drew nearer, as I said; they were almost within hail; Dan saw her hair streaming on the wind; he waited only for the long wave. On it came, that long wave,—oh! I can see it now!—plunging and rearing and swelling, a monstrous billow, sweeping and swooning and rocking in. Its hollows gaped with slippery darkness, it towered and sent the scuds before its trembling crest, breaking with a mighty rainbow as the sun burst forth, it fell in a white blindness everywhere, rushed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... over my grief. On the fourth day I dressed at seven o'clock and went on deck to have some fresh air. It was icy cold, and as I walked up and down I met a lady dressed in black with a sad resigned face. The sea looked gloomy and colourless, and there were no waves. Suddenly a wild billow dashed so violently against the ship that we were both thrown down. I immediately clutched hold of the leg of one of the benches, but the unfortunate lady was flung forward. Springing to my feet with a bound, I was just in time to seize hold of the skirt of her dress, and with the help of ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt
... adieus, more handkerchiefing, more tears and laughter, more ear-splitting shrieks of steam and a black plume of smoke that rose in a billow, and hand in hand Miriam and Irving Shapiro joggling down the gang-plank to ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... on the top of the drill. Almost immediately, it developed into a tongue of rocket flame. Then a glow appeared at the base of the drill and flame began to billow out from beneath the tube. The drill began to sink into the surface, and the planetoid began ...
— Anchorite • Randall Garrett |
