"Billow" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 aroma with ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... 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, ...
— The Beggar's Opera • John Gay
... to the inevitable missing spoke. It pointed to a ranch-type establishment that lay sprawled out in a billow of dead area. I eyed it warily and kept on driving because my plans did not include marching up to the front ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... dominated him, a passion like the devils that made men gash themselves and leap from precipices into the sea. To unaccustomed eyes the first sight of passion is always terrifying and is usually repellent. One must learn to adventure the big wave, the great hissing, towering billow that conceals behind its menace the wild rapture of ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... she was in such imminent peril that not an eye was closed in slumber, excepting in the case of little Inez Hawthorne, who felt the situation only to the extent that it compelled her to stay close in the cabin, while the vessel pitched and tossed from the crest of one tremendous billow, down, seemingly, into the fathomless depths between, and then laboriously climbed the mountain in front, with the spray and mist whirling about the deck and rigging like millions of fine shot. But the gallant Coral rode it out safely, and the steady breeze ...
— Adrift on the Pacific • Edward S. Ellis
... gazing out upon the wilderness of peaks. The view from Marcy is peculiar. It is without softness or relief. The narrow valleys are only dark shadows; the lakes are bits of broken mirror. From horizon to horizon there is a tumultuous sea of billows turned to stone. You stand upon the highest billow; you command the situation; you have surprised Nature in a high creative act; the mighty primal energy has only just become repose. This was a supreme hour to Old Phelps. Tea! I believe the boys succeeded in kindling ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Porthos, drawing himself up. It is a sad thing to have to confess, but a man's heart is like an ocean billow; for, from that very moment Porthos ceased to look at Madame Truchen in that touching manner which had so softened her heart. Planchet encouraged these ambitious leanings as best as he could. He talked over, ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... fishes caught in the threads of moonlight; the depths over which one bent, peering half wistfully, half abstractedly, almost crazily, till he longed to drop into their coolness, and let the volumes of billow roll ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... every billow, The sun's shield shines 'neath many a golden spear, To lean with you, against this leafy pillow, To murmur words of love in this loved ear— To feel you bending like a bending willow, This is to ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... even the Eskimo dogs; though times and seasons can scarcely be chosen when travelling in Athabasca, for a storm comes unawares. Upon the plains you will see a cloud arising, not in the sky, but from the ground—a billowy surf of drifting snow; then another white billow from the sky will sweep down and meet it, and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... wise men bowling o'er the billow, Or him, less wise, Who chose rough bramble-bushes for a pillow, ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... 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
... once that the wave would be upon him before he could reach the deck, and that there was only one way of escape. Thrusting his slim figure between the beams of the open-work, where no full-grown man could have passed, he held on with all his strength. Crash came the great billow against the side, making the whole ship quiver from stem to stern; but Austin remained unhurt. The next moment he was safe ...
— Harper's Young People, March 30, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... 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 roll ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... 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 ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... piteous terror of the appointed end, For this I sigh! The billow, poised above, Fell on thee like a beast that leaps to rend: Thou couldst not know thy bridegroom Death ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... would have been the outcome of Charles's career if pitted against almost any other monarch of Russia that one could name it is difficult to imagine. But pitted against Peter the Great he was like a foaming billow hurling itself against an ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 9 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. Scandinavian. • Charles Morris
... not a word. But Helen spake to him with gentle words: "My brother, even mine that am a dog, mischievous and abominable, would that on the day when my mother bare me at the first, an evil storm-wind had caught me away to a mountain or a billow of the loud-sounding sea, where the billow might have swept me away before all these things came to pass. Howbeit, seeing the gods devised all these ills in this wise, would that then I had been mated with a better man, that felt dishonour and the multitude of men's reproachings. ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... of the ocean, Down, down through vast storeys of darkness, behold, in the tower Of the heaven, the thunder! on stairways of cloudy commotion, Colossal of tread, like a giant, from echoing hour to hour Goes striding in rattling armor ... The Nymph, at her billow-roofed dormer Of foam; and the Sylvan—green-housed—at her window of leaves appears; —As a listening woman, who hears The approach of her lover, who comes to her arms in the night; And, loosening the loops of her locks, With eyes ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... wave was upon me before I had thought to execute these instructions, I straightened myself out rigidly, and lo! I shot in like a torpedo on the very top of the billow, holding the point of the board up, yelling like a Comanche Indian. So fast, so straight did I go, that it was all I could do to swerve in the shallow water and not be hurled ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... hills rise suddenly from the sea, bold, harsh, immitigable, yet softened by their aspect of gray endurance. Hacked and scored, tossed, fissured, and torn, weather-beaten and bleached, their bluntness becomes grave, their hardness pathetic. About their caverned bases the billow thunders in perpetual assault, proclaiming the purpose of the sea to reclaim what it has lost. Above, the frost inserts its potent lever, and flings down from time to time some bellowing fragment to its ally below. The shores, as if to escape from this warfare, hurry down, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... The billow of white smoke filled the northern sky. A whirl of gray wood ashes, light as air, floated on and ever on over Superior. The site of the mill, the squares where the piles of lumber had stood, glowed incandescence over which already a ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... either to excite admiration or to impart instruction. The Sandwich Islands present some of the sublimest scenery on earth, but to an ignorant native—to the great mass of the people in entire heathenism—it has no meaning. As one crested billow after another of the heaving ocean rolls in and dashes upon the unyielding rocks of an iron-bound coast, which seems to say, "Hitherto shalt thou come and no farther," the low-minded heathen is ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... Hugged in the clinging billow's clasp, From sea-weed fringe to mountain heather, The British oak with rooted grasp Her slender handful holds together;— With cliffs of white and bowers of green, And Ocean narrowing to caress her, And hills and threaded streams ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... melancholy. She was little more than fifteen years old, yet that age, in those tropical climates, answers fully to a European one-and-twenty. In form, she was a perfect woman, light, rounded, and extremely active; all her motions were as graceful, and as undulating as the gently-swelling billow. If she moved quickly, she bounded; if slowly, she appeared to glide on effortless through space. She had taken her lessons of grace in the woods, and her gymnasium had been among the sportive billows of the ocean. It is but of little use me describing her face; for everyone ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... as her eye wandered about the vacant room, it fell upon a white and tempestuous ocean of counterpane, an ocean breaking into strange movements of wave and crest and billow. ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... before it was glittering under the lugger's bottom. Occasionally a pursuing sea cast the stern upward, as if about to throw it in advance of the bows; but le Feu-Follet was too much accustomed to this treatment to be disturbed, and she ever rose on the billow, like a bubble, and then the glancing arrow scarce surpassed the speed with which she hastened forward, as ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... the surging billow's roar, 'Tis not that fatal, deadly shore; Tho' death in ev'ry shape appear, The wretched have no more to fear: But round my heart the ties are bound, That heart transpierc'd with many a wound: These bleed ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... were breastworks, with strong, loose ropes attached, so that those who clung to this refuge might support themselves with comparative safety, or rather have a chance for life, when our "floating grave" should hang suspended perpendicularly on the steep side of a mountain-billow, or drift ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... Bilberry 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. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... great in their 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, and no one ever will ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... you can find a competent assassin, I wouldn't make it a point with him to oblige Mr. Markley. I don't care particularly to have the poet buried in the weltering sea. If he can't find a roaring billow, I'll be perfectly satisfied to have him chucked into a creek. And I dare say that it'll make no material difference whether the dolphins gobble him or the catfish and eels nibble him up. It's all the same in the ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... billow, cease thy motion, Bear me not so swiftly o'er; Cease thy roaring, foamy ocean, I will tempt thy ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... 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 ...
— The Indian Fairy Book - From the Original Legends • Cornelius Mathews
... settled out of sight. Soon, too, the forecastle was filled with water, and the helpless little band were driven to the deck, where they clustered round the foremast. Presently, even this frail support was loosened from the hull, and rose and fell with every billow. It was plain to all that the final moment drew swiftly nigh. Of the four seamen who still stood by the passengers, three were as efficient as any among the crew of the Elizabeth. These were the steward, carpenter, and cook. The fourth was an old sailor, who, broken down by ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... fury worked this wonder. For the craft came in on a tall billow that flung her, as a sling might, clean against the cliff's face, crumpling the bowsprit like paper, sending the foremast over with a crash, and driving a jagged tooth of rock five feet into her ribs beside the breastbone. So, for a moment it left ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... as we go. Swing his coffin to and fro; As of old the lusty billow Swayed him on his heaving pillow: So that he may fancy still, Climbing up the watery hill, Plunging in the watery vale, With her wide-distended sail, His good ship securely stands ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... tribune, incessantly vibrating, gushed forth perpetually a sort of sonorous flood, a mighty oscillation of sentiments and ideas, which, from billow to billow, and from people to people, flowed to the utmost confines of the earth, to set in motion those intelligent waves which are called souls. Frequently one knew not why such and such a law, such and such an ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... were right beneath her bows, She drifted a dreary wreck, And a whooping billow swept the crew Like ...
— The Children's Own Longfellow • Henry W. Longfellow
... side, and in idleness of spirit ponder on bygone scene, that has brought us anything but happiness,—to gaze on the curling waves, as impelled by the boisterous wind, we ride o'er the angry waters, lashed by the sable keel to a yeasty madness,—to look afar upon the disturbed billow, presenting its crested head like the curved neck of the war horse,—then to mark the screaming sea bird, as, his bright eye scanning the waters, he soars above the stormy main—its wide tumult his delight—the roaring of the winds his melody—the shrieks of the drowned an harmonious symphony ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... loose from the gaskets, and, fluttering away with loud flaps, was soon reduced to ribbons, knotted and twisted in every conceivable way. As the ship fell off into the trough of the sea when her sails rent, a foaming billow came roaring up, and striking her, made a clean breach over us. There were shouts and cries fore and aft. Jerry and I held on for our lives. Happily the stanchions we held to did not give way. Half terrified, ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... 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 ...
— Old Man Savarin and Other Stories • Edward William Thomson
... was very heavy but the men behaved steadily and well; and through it we went, dancing along like a cork in a mill-pond; at last one huge roller caught us, all hands gave way, and we were hurried along on the top of the swelling billow, which then suddenly fell under us and broke; in a moment after we had grounded, and although still upwards of two hundred yards from the shore, we all jumped out to haul the boat up, but ere we could move our heavily laden whaler ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... scoff at Eternal Truth; while you, bringing forth children, who, instead of becoming heirs of Christ, become aliens from His fold, while your sin—your treachery—your apostasy will, like an onward billow, roll through future generations, until it dashes itself, with its black abominations, at the feet of the Eternal Judge. But, my dear child, through the mercy of God, and your own example, you may win this wandering soul to embrace the truth: at any rate, ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... queen, she loved not the world; She floated on the waves of the world As the sea-bird floats upon the billow. ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... on my pillow, As a ship without rudder or spars Is tumbled and tossed on the billow, 'Neath the glint and the glory of stars. 'Tis midnight and moonlight, and slumber Has hushed every heart but my own; O why are these thoughts without number Sent to me by the ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... as I wuz walkin' upstairs as peaceful as our old brindle cow goin' up the south hill paster, my skirts begun to billow out till they got as big as a hogsit. I didn't care about its bein' fashion to not bulge out round the bottom of your skirts but hobble in; but I see the folks below wuz laughin' at me, and it madded me some when I hadn't done a thing, only jest walk upstairs ...
— Samantha at Coney Island - and a Thousand Other Islands • Marietta Holley
... more billow on the sea of graves; One joyaunt voice the fewer in life's throng; One hand the less to help the world along; One Hero ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... 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 opal on ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... to the sea gate at the end of a warm, still, foggy day. There in the deepening twilight we drifted without a sign of a world around us—till in from the ocean there came a deep billow, then another and another, and as our small craft darted off to one side a gigantic gray shadow loomed through the fog with four black towers of smoke overhead, lights ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... mean! There was naething intill 't but a pennyworth o' blastin' pooder. It wadna blaw the froth aff o' the tap o' a jaw (billow)." ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... I was down when there was a sudden flare as though the sun had risen, and I saw still a few heads bobbing and a few arms waving frantically around me. At the same instant a terrific detonation split the ears; and when I rose on the next bald billow, where the ship lay burning a few seconds before, there remained but a red-hot spine that hissed and dwindled for another minute, and then left a blackness through which every star ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... me!" cried Porthos, drawing himself up. It is a sad thing to have to confess, but a man's heart is like a restless billow; for, from that very moment, Porthos ceased to look at Madame Truechen in that touching manner which had so softened her heart. Planchet encouraged these ambitious leanings in the best way he could. He talked over, or rather gave exaggerated accounts ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... right, for after they had remained fast a little longer they were saved, thus: Suddenly the wind dropped, then it rose again in a last furious squall, driving before it a very mountain of water. This vast billow, as it rushed shorewards, caught the galley in its white arms and lifted her not only off the rock whereon she lay, but over the further reefs, to cast her down again upon a bed of sand and shells, ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... circumstanced now, to what I was then. Instead of a frail cockle-shell, that threatened to be capsized by every billow that approached it, and that would scarcely hold two persons comfortably, I was master of a well-built ship's-boat, that would hold half a dozen with ease, and except in very rough weather, was as ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... from cabin to beach passed in a blur of speed. The Scoop reached deeper water and submerged, throwing a mountainous billow that sent the Island Queen reeling ...
— Traders Risk • Roger Dee
... any reward. She has saved more lives than Davy's belt, and thousands of pounds to the under-writers. This poor creature, in her younger days, witnessed her husband struggling with the waves, and swallowed up by the remorseless billow, "in sight of home and friends who thronged to save." This circumstance seems to have prompted her present devoted and solitary life, in which her only enjoyment ...
— Gems Gathered in Haste - A New Year's Gift for Sunday Schools • Anonymous
... 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 ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... his struggle in the darkness with the wild waves and the blast, On a rock, where every billow broke above him as it passed, Alone, of all his household, the man of God ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... they were in the welter of white. Once when the little craft went completely out of sight behind a monster swell, Loll, watching from the cabin top, shouted in alarm, but yelled again in delight as it rose high on the same billow. ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby
... restless pillow, His head heaves with the heaving billow, That hand, whose motion is not life, Yet feebly seems to menace strife, Flung by the tossing tide on high, Then ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... 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 the darkness of ...
— A Book of Myths • Jean Lang
... 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 into a spindling pine wood. Behind it lay ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... as Cerimon, a worthy gentleman of Ephesus, and a most skilful physician, was standing by the sea-side, his servants brought to him a chest, which they said the sea-waves had thrown on the land. 'I never saw,' said one of them, 'so huge a billow as cast it on our shore.' Cerimon ordered the chest to be conveyed to his own house and when it was opened he beheld with wonder the body of a young and lovely lady; and the sweet-smelling spices and rich casket of jewels made him conclude it was some great person who was thus strangely entombed: ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... 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
... This surf never 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 ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... swift flocks, and that I were lifted up above the ocean wave that dashes against the Adriatic shore, and the water of Eridanus, where for grief of Phaethon the thrice wretched virgins let fall into their father's billow the amber-beaming brightness of their tears: and that I could make my way to the shore where the apples grow of the harmonious daughters of Hesperus, where the ruler of the ocean no longer permits the passage ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... sight. Of a sudden, a mass of Cuirassiers rushed forth from the invaders' ranks, flung itself uphill, and girdled the grim earthwork with a stream of flashing steel There, for a brief space, it was stayed by the tough Muscovite lines, until another billow of horsemen, marshalled by Grouchy and Chastel, swept all before it, took the redoubt on its weak reverse, and overwhelmed its devoted defenders.[266] In vain did the Russian cavalry seek to save ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... aloud at Land, A fuller blast 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 view ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... fire until the enemy was almost upon us. At the right instant our rifles poured out a perfect billow of death. Painted bodies reeled and fell; horses sank down, or rushed mad with pain, upon their fallen riders; shrieks of agony mingled with the unearthly yells; while above all this, the steady roar of our guns—not a wasted bullet in all the line—carried death waves out from the ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... me I see, like hounds at play, How billow on billow dashes; Yea, tossing aloft the glittering spray, The fierce throng hisses and clashes. Oh, might I leap into the raging flood And urge ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... the 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 on this ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor
... where disintegration is the sole unity of plan, and being ground up and destroyed for some no-idea of the Power of darkness. And then would be the time for the good—no, not to tremble, but to resolve with the Lord of light to endure all, to let every billow of evil dash and break upon him, nor do the smallest ill, tell the whitest lie for God—knowing that any territory so gained could belong to no kingdom of heaven, could be but a province of the kingdom ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... your social joys, Parent, filial, kindred ties?— Common friend to you and me, Nature's gifts to all are free: Peaceful keep your dimpling wave, Busy feed, or wanton lave: Or, beneath the sheltering rock, Bide the surging billow's shock. ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... was on the point of burying them irrecoverably 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 spot, where, by her earnest efforts, she soon restored them and dispelled ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... ship steaming across the billow, That should have brought him to his mother's knee; Did warning dreams hover around her pillow, Of the dear face she never more shall see? She sits at home deeming that all is well, Who shall the ...
— Verses and Rhymes by the way • Nora Pembroke
... 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 ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... mysterious green solitude of tropic forests, to islands fringed with silver surf, in whose sunny flashing sported nude girls of faultless forms, showing their teeth of pearl in merry laughter, winding amorously with the blue billow, and filling the aromatic breeze with the melody of their language of the sun. Ha! thought I, sailors see some changes in their time; and with a hearty sigh I stepped into ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... the subject of closed ports was given in our cabin, where the fair chatelaine was reclining in her berth reading, fanned by the genial air which floated in at the open port,—a truculent Red Sea billow, meeting a slight roll of the ship, entered the cabin in an unbroken fall on the lady's head. A damp tigress flew out through the door, wildly demanding the steward, a set of dry bedding, and the instant execution of the captain, the officer of the watch, and the man ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... that moment she was lost to view in the trough of the sea. Instead of springing overboard, as all expected, he asked another instant of delay. The yawl sank into the trough itself, and rose on the succeeding billow. Then he saw the cutter, and Wallace and Mulford standing in its bows. He waved his hat to them, and sprang high into the air, with the intent to make himself seen; when he came down the boat had shot her length away from the place, ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... o'clock, the weather was cloudy, the sea grey, but calm. Scarcely a billow. Captain Nemo, whom I hoped to meet, would he be there? I saw no one but the steersman imprisoned in his glass cage. Seated upon the projection formed by the hull of the pinnace, I inhaled the salt ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... he thrust his distorted face into the wagon with a grin, but the wagon was a wagon no longer, the horses were not horses—all was transformed to foam and vanished in the hissing waves, and even the wagoner himself, rising as a gigantic billow, drew down the vainly struggling horse beneath the waters, and then, swelling higher and higher, swept over the heads of the floating pair, like some liquid tower, threatening to bury ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... hands and matched their might in deadly strife. Hereupon the Bebrycian king even as a fierce wave of the sea rises in a crest against a swift ship, but she by the skill of the crafty pilot just escapes the shock when the billow is eager to break over the bulwark—so he followed up the son of Tyndareus, trying to daunt him, and gave him no respite. But the hero, ever unwounded, by his skill baffled the rush of his foe, and he quickly noted ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... from the danger of the lesser driuing yce. [Sidenote: Hard shifts.] But when they must needes forgoe this new found fort by meanes of other yce, which at length would vndermine and compasse them round about, and when that by heauing of the billow they were therewith like to be brused in peeces, they vsed to make fast the shippe vnto the most firme and broad peece of yce they could find, and binding her nose fast thereunto, would fill all their sayles whereon the winde ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, Vol. XII., America, Part I. • Richard Hakluyt
... from the second reef earing up to the peak. Though the waves rushed by the vessel with the velocity of the fleetest steeds, and demolished everything that obstructed their career, our craft appeared to defy their fury, and sprung from billow, to billow with the playful airiness of ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... come back to that picture of yesterday: old Fort Leavenworth on the bluff; the little and big ravines that billow the landscape about it; the faint lines of trails winding along the hillsides toward the southwest; the unclouded skies so everlastingly big and intensely blue; and, hanging like a spray of glorious blossoms flung high above ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... in Wiesbaden. On the 5th June Bulow conducts the first concert there, at which Bronsart's beautiful and valuable "Fruhlings-Fantasie," Billow's music to Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar," and my "Faust Symphony" will be performed. Bulow kindly plays the piano the same evening, and has chosen Tschaikowsky's Concerto. Besides this his favorite pupil Schwarz produces several "Etudes transcendantes." ...
— Letters of Franz Liszt, Volume 2: "From Rome to the End" • Franz Liszt; letters collected by La Mara and translated
... of wind at this instant swept past them, their frail vessel shook in every timber, and, mounting on a sweeping wave that came howling along, was sent forward with frightful impetuosity to a great distance; when, as if the angry billow disdained its weight, it was precipitated into a gulf of foam which dashed above the sunken rocks whose points received it. "Oh, Beatrix!" exclaimed the young fisherman; "it is all over; we shall meet no more; our fate has overtaken us at last! My friend," he added, ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... a start, crying out that his father was dead. The child was quieted, and again he woke up exclaiming that his father was drowned. A month later the news came that his father had, in fact, been swept off the deck of his smack by a billow. The widow then remembered how her son had wakened up and spoken of his father's death. Everyone said it was a miracle, and the affair caused a great sensation. The dates were compared, and it was found that the accident and the dream had very ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... 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 ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... huge billow rising, curving, high as the gaff of the main, it seemed to him, as he grasped at the coil of the main halyards. Down came the tons of water, booming on the deck that bent under the blow, spilling in a great cataract that swashed ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... 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 ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... temper to tell a story—me settin' yere with every nerve as tight as a banjo catgut jest before it snaps. To reelate yarns your mood ought to be the mood of the racontoor—a mood as rich an' rank an' upstandin' as a field of wheat, ready to billow an' bend before every gale of fancy. The way yesterday leaves me, whatever tale I ondertakes to reecount would about come out of my mouth as stiff an' short an' brittle as chopped hay. Also, as tasteless. Better let it go till some other ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis
... ring directly over the dog's nose, and into this ring Newton had fitted a cork, through which he had thrust a large needle which protruded, an inch-long bayonet, in front of Ponto's nose. As the grader swept back, horses straining, harness creaking and a billow of dark earth rolling before the knife, Ponto, fully equipped with this stinger, raced madly alongside, a friend to every man, but not unlike some people, one whose friendship was of all things to be ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... tall Orion stalking o'er the flood: When with his brawny breast he cuts the waves, His shoulder scarce the topmost billow laves." ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... the ship's head to the westward and the wind aft, under all sail; now rising to the summit of a glass-like billow, now sinking deep down into the valley to climb up the watery steep on the opposite side. We had touched at Rio, to obtain a supply of wood and water and fresh provisions; but I need not give a description of that magnificent harbour, as nothing ...
— Twice Lost • W.H.G. Kingston
... swept round with its bow to the east just in time to meet a billow, which, towering high above its fellows, burst completely over the rocks, and appeared to be about to sweep away all before it. For a moment the boat was as if embedded in snow, then it sank once more into the lead among the floating tangle, and the men ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne
... structure, but a few hours past, as perfect as human intellect could devise, towering with its proud canvas over space, and bearing man to greet his fellow-man, over the surface of death!—dashing the billow from her stem, as if in scorn, while she pursued her trackless way—bearing tidings of peace and security, of war and devastation—tidings of joy or grief, affecting whole kingdoms and empires, as if they were ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... empire of the main to keep, And guide her squadrons o'er the trembling deep. Her left, propitious, bore a mystic shield, 770 Around whose margin rolls the watery field; There her bold genius in his floating car O'er the wild billow, hurls the storm of war: And, lo! the beasts [9] that oft with jealous rage In bloody combat met, from age to age, Tamed into union, yoked in friendship's chain, Draw his proud chariot round the vanquish'd main; From ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... Supremacy," which was the objectionable one to the Catholics, was dispensed with. Now, if we stood in the same circumstances as the Catholics did in 1828, the example would be in point. When the public mind is thoroughly revolutionized, and ready for the change, when the billow has reached its height and begins to crest into foam, then such a measure may bring matters to a crisis. But let us first go through, in patience, as O'Connell did, our twenty years of agitation. Waiving all other objections, this plan seems to me mere playing at politics, and an entire ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... westward since the early part of the seventeenth century resembles the great ocean billows during a rising tide. Sweeping over the watery waste with a steady roll, dragged by the lunar force, each billow dashes higher and higher on the beach, until the attractive influence has been spent and the final limit reached. The spirit of religious liberty and of adventure carried the European across the Atlantic. This was the first wave of emigration. The achievement ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... lie on his plumpy pillow, The moon for company, And hear the parrot scream to the billow, ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare
... 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 flash ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... A mighty billow flings its cloud of foam over the faces of Claude and the shrinking girl by his side, and blinds them with salt spray. But high as the tide is, the Chair is still above its reach, and although the wave may sprinkle ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... aspiration and worship, the entity which is able to fuse 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 ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... has got his ship into this mess, and, as far as he is concerned, he richly deserves it," observed Jack, trying to catch a glimpse through his glass of the wreck, as she rose, in the far distance, on the summit of a billow, quickly again to disappear. "It's a sad fate for those poor fellows who have lost their lives, and I am very much afraid that they will not be the only ones. It's a question whether the corvette will weather out ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... accursed time They bore thee o'er the billow, From Love to titled age and crime And an unholy pillow— From me, and from our misty clime Where weeps the ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... to the opposite bank, on which were standing twelve thousand men—erect, excited, defiant. I was sure that at the next shot they would surge straight against the Stockade like a mighty human billow, and then a carnage would begin the like of which ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... a single good cigar, the last of my importation. I lighted it and blew forth a snowy billow of heavenly aroma. I know something about human nature, even the feminine side of it. A presentable young man with a roll of aromatic tobacco seldom falls to win the confidence of those about him. With that cloud of smoke the raw ...
— The Princess Elopes • Harold MacGrath
... soft voices and fluttering blue wings. I have seen thousands of them go through a beech wood, like a blue wave, picking up the sprouting beechnuts. Those in the rear would be constantly flying over those in front, so that the effect was that of a vast billow of mingled white and blue and brown, rustling and murmuring as it went. One spring afternoon vast flocks of them were passing south over our farm for hours, when some of them began to pour down in the beech woods on the hill by the roadside. A part of nearly every flock that streamed by would split ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... to have perished was their only hope. Far as from Leucas point the placid main Spreads to the horizon, from the billow's crest They viewed the dashing of th' infuriate sea; Thence sinking to the middle trough, their mast Scarce topped the watery height on either hand, Their sails in clouds, their keel upon the ground. For all the sea was piled into the waves, ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... desperate exertions, he can raise them no higher, and there they hang suspended over the dark abyss of whirling waters that had opened in the disrupturing mass beneath, at the instant, as if to receive them; while a mountain billow of ice, that must overwhelm them with certain destruction, is rolling down, with angry roar, within a few rods of the spot. A groan of despair burst from the exhausted man at the rope; and his grasp was about ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... billow, Our op'ning timbers creak; Each fears a wat'ry pillow, None stop the dreadful leak! To cling to slipp'ry shrouds, Each breathless seaman crowds, As she lay, till the day, In ...
— Old Ballads • Various
... 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 ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... longer, nothing should turn up to improve the present aspect of affairs. It was now eleven o'clock; P. M. Fitz and Sigurdr went to bed, while I remained on deck to see what the night might bring forth. It blew great guns, and the cold was perfectly intolerable; billow upon billow of black fog came sweeping down between the sea and sky, as if it were going to swallow up the whole universe; while the midnight sun—now completely blotted out—now faintly struggling through the ragged breaches of the mist—threw down from time to time an ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... knew what else was happening. My heart was heaving like a dead body on a billow. All that the priest had said was gone. In its place there was a paralysing despair as if the wheels of life were ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... profound no words could well express: His wand'ring fingers smooth my hair in silent token, And all my being answers to the tender mute caress. My head is resting on his breast for pillow, And as by music moved my soul is thrill'd; Flow on and clasp the land, O bursting billow! O breezes, tell the mountains many-rill'd! Our hearts now know each other, and ...
— Ideala • Sarah Grand
... creeps up the western horizon. Tom, gesticulating, swears that he sees 'a billow break.' True: there they come; the great white horses, that 'champ and chafe, and toss in the spray.' That long-becalmed trawler to seaward fills, and heels over, and begins to tug and leap impatiently at the weight of her heavy trawl. Five minutes more, and the breeze will be down upon ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... Potomac tossed their gold to the feet of the battalions as they came to the Long Bridge and in almost interminable line passed over. The Capitol never seemed so majestic as that morning: snowy white, looking down upon the tides of men that came surging down, billow after billow. Passing in silence, yet I heard in every step the thunder of conflicts through which they had waded, and seemed to see dripping from their smoke-blackened flags the blood of our country's martyrs. For the best part of two days we stood and watched the filing on of what seemed ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... 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, ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... his pillow, opened his eyes, and, staring unmeaningly, yawned. The bedclothes were soft and pleasant. He turned the peaked nose that overrides the insufficient moustache, up to the ceiling, a pinkish projection over the billow of white. You might see it wrinkle as he yawned again, and then became quiet. So matters remained for a space. Very slowly recollection returned to him. Then a shock of indeterminate brown hair appeared, and first one watery grey eye a-wondering, and then two; the bed ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... been warned that he should take "great heed lest you fall upon the island of Ireland for fear of the harm that may happen to you on that coast," where, as a sixteenth-century sailor wrote, "the ocean sea raiseth such a billow as can hardly be endured by the greatest ships." There was heavy weather in the "ocean sea" that August and September, but even so the galleons that steered well to the westward before shaping their course for Spain, and ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... adds a fresh touch to the tragic picture. The monotonous repetition of 'and,' 'and,' 'and,' gives the effect of an endless succession of the wares of sorrow, pain, and contumely which broke over that sacred head. We shall do best simply to note each billow as it breaks. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... which the ripple passes into the wavelet, and the wavelet into the billow. On this head, as on all others, there is great value in the teachings of history; and the Free Church might be worse employed than in occasionally conning the lesson. Each fifty years of the last century and half has been marked by its own special questions of ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... stayed him the wide-flowing River, for Athene put great strength in him. Neither did Skamandros slacken his fierceness, but yet more raged against the son of Peleus, and he curled crestwise the billow of his stream, lifting himself on high, and on Simoeis he called with a shout: "Dear brother, the strength of this man let us both join to stay, since quickly he will lay waste the great city of king Priam, and the Trojans abide not in the battle. Help me with speed, and ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... dry pine, that towered so up high above the surrounding forest as to have long served as a landmark for the hunters and fishermen, in setting their courses through the woods or over the lake. Here the fiery billow, as if governed by the human tactics of a military assault, paused, parted, and swept by on either side, till it had inclosed the elevation; when suddenly it shot up from every side in an hundred converging tongues of flame, which, soon meeting and expanding into one, quickly enveloped ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... Ragusa continued to offer strong resistance in the faubourg of Halle to the repeated attacks of General Blucher; while Marshal Ney calmly saw the combined forces of General Woronzow, the Prussian corps under the orders of General Billow, and the Swedish army, break themselves to pieces against his ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... heavy mood from her seat, whereas she sat like unto swan on billow, having a sword in her hand, and a helm on her head, and being clad in a byrny, "O Gunnar," she says, "speak not to me of such things, unless thou be the first and best of all men; for then shalt thou slay those my wooers, if thou hast heart thereto; I have been in battles ...
— The Story of the Volsungs, (Volsunga Saga) - With Excerpts from the Poetic Edda • Anonymous
... wretch, would that, on the day when first my mother brought me forth, a destructive tempest of wind had seized and borne me to a mountain, or into the waves of the much-resounding ocean, where the billow would have swept me away before these doings had occurred. But since the gods have thus decreed these evils, I ought at least to have been the wife of a braver man, who understood both the indignation ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... 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
... with a crash—and the first cable snapped like a pistol shot. The ship rebounded; then drove before the back-wash of the angry sea. With no fate possible but the wall of rocks ahead, the terrorized crew began heaving the dead overboard in the moonlight; but another roaring billow smashed the St. Peter squarely broadside. The second hawser ripped back with the whistling rebound of a whip-lash, and Ofzyn was in the very act of dropping the third and last anchor, when straight as a bullet to the mark, as if hag-ridden by the northern demons of sailor fear, hurled ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut
... employ as many clergymen, barristers, and physicians. When I have stood on the quarter-deck of a ship in a storm, and seen the seamen covering the yards in taking in sail, with the thunder rolling, and the lightning flashing fearfully around them—the sea covered with foam, and each succeeding billow, as it rushed by, seeming ready to sweep them all from their frail footing into the fathomless abyss below—I have asked myself, 'Are men like these to be seized like common felons, torn from their wives and children as soon as they reach their native land, subject every day to the lash, and put ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... for the most part we ran East Southeast all along the shoare, within two leagues alwayes of the same, and found the land all as at the first, ful of woods and great rocks hard aboord the shoare, and the billow beating so sore, that the seas brake vpon the shoare as white as snow, and the water mounted so high that a man might easily discerne it 4. leagues off, in such wise that no boate could land there. Thus we ran vntil 12. ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of - The English Nation, Vol. 11 • Richard Hakluyt
... loved, oh, many a maiden kind, And many a right good fellow,— Where are they all? So pipes the wind, So foams and wanders the billow. ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... containing only four chapters —four yarns —is one of the smallest strands in the mighty cable of the Scriptures. Yet what depths of the soul does Jonah's deep sealine sound! what a pregnant lesson to us is this prophet! What .. a noble thing is that canticle in the fish's belly! How billow-like and boisterously grand! We feel the floods surging over us; we sound with him to the kelpy bottom of the waters; sea-weed and all the slime of the sea is about us! But what is this lesson that the book of Jonah teaches? Shipmates, it is a two-stranded lesson; a lesson to us all as sinful ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... glorious Whore; where be your Fighters? what mortal Fool durst raise thee to this daring, And I alive? by my just Sword, h'ad safer Bestride a Billow when the angry North Plows up the Sea, or made Heavens fire his food; Work me no higher; will ...
— The Maids Tragedy • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... Swift, now, without sound, Creeps stealthily Up to the shore— Creeps, creeps and undulates; As one dissimulates Till, swayed by hateful frenzy, Through passion grown immense, he Bursts forth hostilely; And rising, a smooth billow— Its swelling, sunlit dome Thinned to a tumid ledge With keen, curved edge Like the scornful curl Of lips that snarl— O'ertops itself and breaks Into a raving foam; So springs upon the shore With a hungry roar; Its first fierce anger slakes ...
— Dreams and Days: Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... 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 ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn
... place they found in one of those, Where the cleft shore sea in his bosom takes, And 'twixt his stretched arms doth fold and close An ample bay, a rock the haven makes, Which to the main doth his broad back oppose, Whereon the roaring billow cleaves and breaks, And here and there two crags like turrets high, Point forth a port to all that ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... They give promise of an early generous fruitage. Thrifty orchards of healthy well-grown fruit trees, including many varieties, are fast coming to maturity. Waving fields of golden grain, ripple in the simmering heat of a noon-day sun, or rustle and billow with each passing breeze, under the pale light of a harvest moon. Beautiful fields of cotton and corn, are an inspiration to behold. Fine fields of vegetables, nurseries, gardens and shrubberies, with a wealth of lovely ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... tassels, 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 ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain |
