"Firth" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... impell'd by all-directing Fate, To witness what I after shall narrate; Or whether, rapt in meditation high, He wander'd out he knew not where nor why) The drowsy Dungeon-clock,[61] had number'd two, And Wallace Tow'r[61] had sworn the fact was true: The tide-swol'n Firth, with sullen sounding roar, Through the still night dash'd hoarse along the shore. All else was hush'd as Nature's closed e'e: The silent moon shone high o'er tow'r and tree: The chilly frost, beneath the silver beam, Crept, gently-crusting, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... the Pentland Firth we had a violent gale from the north, which gave us an opportunity of experiencing how the Fram behaved in bad weather. The trial was by no means an easy one. It was blowing a gale, with a cross sea; we kept going practically under full sail, and had the satisfaction ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... recklessly, they had not insured. Thereupon John Douglas, having still over 3000 pounds, invested it in what was then considered a safe concern, and finding his wants very few and very simple, repaired to the Renfrewshire coast, and found there a small cottage overlooking the Firth of Clyde and the sea, where he could live cheaply and comfortably. And he did live there very comfortably and contentedly, though not quite to the satisfaction of his neighbours, who resented the intrusion amongst them of a man who minded his own business, ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... out Edinburgh's dingy station carried one passenger who paid small attention to the scenery between the beautiful capital of Scotland and its famous university town. My one thought when we crossed over the great bridge which spans the Firth of Forth was that it was unconscionably long, and that the train slackened its speed in ...
— John Henry Smith - A Humorous Romance of Outdoor Life • Frederick Upham Adams
... stones sank into the sea in the Pentland Firth, or off the north-western coast of Norway, making a deep round hole, and the waters, rushing into the vortex and gurgling in the holes in the centre of the stones, produced the great whirlpool which ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... other than Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster, a benevolent gentleman of an ingenious and inquiring disposition, who was anxious to exploit the supposed mineral wealth of his barren Scottish possessions. With him Raspe took up his abode for a considerable time at his spray-beaten castle on the Pentland Firth, and there is a tradition, among members of the family, of Sir John's unfailing appreciation of the wide intelligence and facetious humour of Raspe's conversation. Sinclair had some years previously ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... wonders there be, but naught more wondrous than man; Over the surging sea, with a whitening south wind wan, Through the foam of the firth, man makes his perilous way; And the eldest of deities Earth that knows not toil nor decay Ever he furrows and scores, as his team, year in year out, With breed of the yoked horse, the ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles
... the Faith. Modern historians identify him with the Irish St. Odhran, who was driven from his country by the Danes and took refuge in Scotland. He preached the Gospel to the people of Fifeshire and the eastern counties. Eventually he founded a monastery on the Isle of May in the Firth of Forth. Here he suffered martyrdom, together {36} with a great number of his disciples, in an incursion of the Danes. A Priory was built on the island by David I, and placed under the Benedictine Abbey of Reading. Later on it was given over to ...
— A Calendar of Scottish Saints • Michael Barrett
... armistice of that date demanded that Germany give her entire fleet to the keeping of England. For a discussion of the surrender the German light cruiser Koenigsberg brought representatives from the Soldiers' and Sailors' Council, which was then in nominal control of the German fleet, into the Firth of Forth. Admiral Beatty refused to deal with these representatives, and insisted that all arrangements be made through some flag-officer of ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry
... know—I've been looking it up—the Firth Of Clyde, where all the steel ships are built, isn't half as wide as Oakland Creek down there, where all those old hulks lie? Why ain't it a Firth of Clyde? Because the Oakland City Council spends its time debating about ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... Britain had done, and was doing in the war; and it had decided to ask a few individuals to pay personal visits to its munition factories, its great aerodromes, its Great Fleet, which then lay in the Firth of Forth, and to the battle-fields. It was understood that no specific obligation rested upon any member of the party to write of what he saw: he was asked simply to observe and then, with discretion, use his observations ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... Admiral Sims, of the American Navy, King George and the Prince of Wales, were aboard the Queen Elizabeth, the flagship of Admiral Beatty, commanding the Grand Fleet. Five hundred British and American war vessels were in the receiving lines, and convoyed the surrendered German ships to the Firth of Forth, just below Edinburgh, Scotland, where they will lie until their disposal is determined. Among the German vessels surrendered that ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... Nettleship, and Arnold Toynbee and David Eitchie—to mention only those teachers whose voices now are silent—guided the waters into those upper reaches known locally as the Isis. John and Edward Caird brought them up the Clyde, Hutchison Stirling up the Firth of Forth. They have passed up the Mersey and up the Severn and Dee and Don. They pollute the bay of St. Andrews and swell the waters of the Cam, and have somehow crept overland into Birmingham. The stream of german idealism has been diffused over the academical world of Great Britain. ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... a gone-by vintage, and I saw how futile it were to attempt to lead him, while in that state of absorption, to topics which touched my affair. Of a sudden the significance of what he had said crept over me, the word Solway repeating itself in my mind. That firth bordered England itself, and Dorothy was in London! I became reconciled. I had no particle of objection to the Solway save the uneasiness my grandfather would come through, which was beyond helping. Fate had ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the current of his thoughts by frequent change of scene, I travelled with him through the highlands of Scotland, and afterwards down the east coast. In one of these peregrinations of ours we visited the Isle of May, an island near the mouth of the Firth of Forth, which, except in the tourist season, is singularly barren and desolate. Beyond the keeper of the lighthouse there are only one or two families of poor fisher-folk, who sustain a precarious existence by their nets, and by the capture of cormorants and solan geese. This grim ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... lived. He read much and miscellaneously, and picked up odd sorts of knowledge from many quarters—from workmen, carpenters, fishermen and sailors, and above all, from the old boulders strewed along the shores of the Cromarty Firth. With a big hammer which had belonged to his great-grandfather, an old buccaneer, the boy went about chipping the stones, and accumulating specimens of mica, porphyry, garnet, and such like. Sometimes he had a day in the woods, and there, too, ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... was born at Firth, in the parish of Lilliesleaf, in the county of Roxburghshire, on the 17th of August, 1789. From his early youth he composed verses. He merited the attention of Sir Walter Scott, who afforded him pecuniary assistance. He died November 12, 1825, ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... duty I was equal; but my ankle still gave trouble (the splinters from time to time working through the flesh), and in the late summer of 1814 I obtained leave of absence with my step-brother, and spent some pleasant weeks in cruising and fishing about the Moray Firth. Finding that my leg bettered by this idleness, we hired a smaller boat and embarked on a longer excursion, which took us almost to the south-west end of ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... that I had hitherto seen—rather cold and windy, it is true, especially in the winter, but commanding a noble prospect of a range of distant hills, which I was told were 'the hieland hills,' and of a broad arm of the sea, which I heard somebody say was the Firth of Forth. ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... at Mossbank?-I am a fisherman, but I have not been at Mossbank. I live at a place called Firth, about a mile from Mossbank, to the south and ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... rough jest at the farm. He used them when Bobby followed him at the plow-tail or scampered over the heather with him behind the flocks. He used them on the market-day journeyings, and on summer nights, when the sea wind came sweetly from the broad Firth and the two slept, like vagabonds, on a haycock under the stars. The purest pleasure Auld Jock ever knew was the taking of a bright farthing from his pocket to pay for Bobby's delectable bone in Mr. ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... to lighten the wild flight Of Spain, and save her water-casks, a trail Telling of utmost fear. And ever the storm Soared louder across the leagues of rioting sea, Driving her onward like a mighty stag Chased by the wolves. Off the dark Firth of Forth At last, Drake signalled and lay head to wind, Watching. "The chariots of God are twenty thousand," He muttered, as, for a moment close at hand, Caught in some league-wide whirlpool of the sea, The mighty galleons crowded and towered and plunged ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... upon this journey, for to lose a throne is seldom a misfortune accepted with equanimity, and several of the beaten and despondent Saxons had joined the royal exiles. Their voyage, however, was an unprosperous one, and after much beating about by winds and storms they were at last driven up the Firth of Forth, where their ship found shelter in the little bay at the narrowing of the Firth, which has since borne the ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... in the world, the trip down from the solitary little wind-beaten cabin at Point Fullerton to Fort Churchill. That cabin has but one rival in the whole of the Northland— the other cabin at Herschel Island, at the mouth of the Firth, where twenty-one wooden crosses mark twenty-one white men's graves. But whalers come to Herschel. Unless by accident, or to break the laws, they never come in the neighborhood of Fullerton. It is at Fullerton that men die of the most ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... Montijo, from the builders. These trials were of a most searching and exhaustive character, lasting over a full week, at the end of which came the coal-consumption test, consisting of a non-stop run northward at full speed, through the Pentland Firth, round Cape Wrath; then southward outside the Hebrides and past the west coast of Ireland, thence from Mizen Head across to Land's End; up the English Channel and the North Sea, to her starting-point. The run down past the west coast of Ireland, and part of the way up the ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... Friday. I merely want to know once how you are, and if all is well I shall move onward. It is of not much use staying here. After I had written to you on Friday I crossed by the ferry over the Firth and walked to Beauly, and from thence to Beaufort or Castle Downie; at Beauly I saw the gate of the pit where old Fraser used to put the people whom he owed money to—it is in the old ruined cathedral, and at Beaufort saw the ruins of the house where ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... sailed with a powerful flotilla, which was however almost annihilated by a storm. For a time then at least there was no danger of another French expedition to Scotland. Wynter's fleet commanded the Firth of Forth, and the French soon found that, except for an occasional raid, they would have to confine their efforts to making their ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes |
