"Earthquake" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which no force can stay, no violence restrain, like love, that wins its way and cannot be withstood by any human power, because itself is divine power. If spring came but once a century, instead of once a year, or burst forth with a sound of an earthquake and not in silence, what wonder and expectation would there be in all hearts ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year - Edited by Katherine D. Blake and Georgia Alexander • Various
... every day, from six to eight and from nine to eleven, all the year round, Sundays and festas included, unless some irremovable obstacle, such as an illness or a wedding in the family, or the death of the king or an earthquake, necessitates the closing of the theatre. Nearly all the rest of every day they are cleaning up and ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... place where the treasure-cave was situated before he led the expedition there for the purpose of recovering the remainder of the gold and jewels. But to his utter consternation he found, when he reached the locality, that an earthquake had recently occurred which had changed the whole ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood
... establishments we see and feel every day.—A native of America who cannot read and write, is as rare an appearance as a Jacobite, or a Roman Catholic, i. e. as rare as a comet or an earthquake.—It has been observed, that we are all of us lawyers, divines, politicians, and philosophers.—And I have good authorities to say, that all candid foreigners who have passed through this country, and conversed ...
— A Collection of State-Papers, Relative to the First Acknowledgment of the Sovereignty of the United States of America • John Adams
... Secundus was then alive,— Snuffy old drone from the German hive. That was the year when Lisbon-town Saw the earth open and gulp her down, And Braddock's army was done so brown, Left without a scalp to its crown. It was on the terrible Earthquake-day That the Deacon ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... fought out the war; the combatants on the other side were commanded by the kings of Atlantis, which, as I was saying, was an island greater in extent than Libya and Asia, and when afterwards sunk by an earthquake, became an impassable barrier of mud to voyagers sailing from hence to any part of the ocean. The progress of the history will unfold the various nations of barbarians and families of Hellenes which then existed, ...
— Critias • Plato
... Paradise of the World! There we long to remain, where on account of the greatness of our love the days ever appear to us to be few. There are delightful libraries in cells redolent with aromatics, there flourishing greenhouses of all sorts of volumes, there academic meads, trembling with the earthquake of Athenian Peripatetics pacing up and down, there the promontory of Parnassus and the Porticoes of the Stoics." The Duke of Roxburghe and Earl Spencer, two gallant sportsmen whose spoils have enriched the land; Monkbarns also, ...
— Books and Bookmen • Ian Maclaren
... This earthquake which invisible powers heave up out of the knotty entanglement of our dark enigmatical being! which in boisterous senseless noises announces that within, in the unseen world, the soul neither recks of nor knows truth or falsehood, and has just been murdering the innocent ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... but on earth, every time there's a lightning flash, it electrolyzes some water vapor into hydrogen and oxygen, and then the hydrogen escapes into space, because terrestrial gravitation won't hold it permanently. And every time there's an earthquake, some water is lost to the interior. Slow—but damned certain." He turned to Harrison. ...
— Valley of Dreams • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... notion at all of propounding a new ideal. There is no new ideal imaginable by the madness of modern sophists, which will be anything like so startling as fulfilling any one of the old ones. On the day that any copybook maxim is carried out there will be something like an earthquake on the earth. There is only one thing new that can be done under the sun; and that is to look at the sun. If you attempt it on a blue day in June, you will know why men do not look straight at their ideals. There is only one really startling ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... the bottom of the sea! Many a time. But here I am, happy and jolly. What's the odds?" He goes off into such a fit of laughter that the chair is shaken and he himself nearly suffocated by a cough like an earthquake. ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... the face of the whole earth unto this day; this is why He destroyed heathen Rome of old, and why He has destroyed, from time to time, in every age and country, great nations and mighty cities by earthquake, and famine, and pestilence, and the sword; because He knows that sin is ruin and misery to all; that it is a disease which spreads by infection among fallen men; and that He must cut off the corrupt nation for the sake of preserving mankind, as the surgeon cuts off a diseased limb, that his patient's ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... sudden deaths at Indian Bar. Inquest in the open. Cosmopolitan gathering thereat. Wife of one of the deceased an advanced bloomer. Animadversions on strong-minded bloomers seeking their rights. California pheasant, the gallina del campo of the Spaniards. Pines and dies in captivity. Smart, harmless earthquake-shocks. ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... and the Teutons, the national name of the Germans. They came from afar, northward, from the Cimbrian peninsula, nowadays Jutland, and from the countries bordering on the Baltic which nowadays form the duchies of Holstein and Schleswig. A violent shock of earthquake, a terrible inundation, had driven them, they said, from their homes; and those countries do indeed show traces of such events. And Cimbrians and Teutons had been for some time ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... de' Pertarti. When the proud giant fell because of the bloody and miry state of the ground it was as though a mountain had fallen so that the country shook as with an earthquake, and terror fell on Pluto in hell. From the violence of the shock he lay as stunned on the level ground. Suddenly the people, seeing him as one killed by a thunderbolt, turned back; like ants running wildly over the body of the fallen oak, so these rushing over his ample limbs.......... them with ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... men of whom I have vaguely heard but whom I have never known. Kohler and Frohling—who built the great stone winery on the vineyard called Tokay, but who built upon a hill up which other vineyardists refused to haul their grapes. So Kohler and Frohling lost the land; the earthquake of 1906 threw down the winery; and I now ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... base as firm as granite rock, He built its walls as fair as falling snow, And built them well, nor storm, nor earthquake shock Has moved, tho' built two ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... friend, he brought him into the house where all his weapons were stored, a numerous and exceedingly noteworthy array. Thereupon they say that the weapons shook of their own accord and gave forth a sound of no ordinary or casual sort, and then it seemed to Gizeric that there had been an earthquake, but when he got outside and made enquiries concerning the earthquake, since no one else agreed with him, a great wonder, they say, came over him, but he was not able to comprehend the meaning of what had happened. So Majorinus, having accomplished the very things he wished, returned ...
— History of the Wars, Books III and IV (of 8) - The Vandalic War • Procopius
... more, in the struggle for existence, the battle with the powers of Nature; tolerably fertile, tolerably temperate; with boundless means of water communication; freer than most parts of the world from those terrible natural phenomena, like the earthquake and the hurricane, before which man lies helpless and astounded, a child beneath the foot of a giant. Nature was to them not so inhospitable as to starve their brains and limbs, as it has done for the Esquimaux or Fuegian; and not ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... disappearance before the hissing of its flight came to my ears—a hissing so sharp, so nastily insistent that it reached me even above the noise of the wind. And more than another minute had passed before the earth beneath me was wrenched and jarred as if by an earthquake and the most thunderous detonations I had ever heard burst over me ...
— Flight Through Tomorrow • Stanton Arthur Coblentz
... height above, and to have been arrested by miracle before much harm was done; and Vanno remembered the cure's first letter which had told him the legend of the place: how Roquebrune in punishment for the sins of its inhabitants was shaken off its high eyrie by a great earthquake, but stopped on the shoulder of the mountain through intercession of the Virgin, the special patron sainte vierge of the district. The town and its dominating castle seen from below showed as if flattened against the mountain's breast; but coming into the place on foot, the mountain ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... heightens, and falsifies. Only its Nemesis is the same as that of other arts: if it loses all care for truth it loses all form likewise. The modern who paints too cleverly produces a picture of a cow which might be the earthquake at San Francisco. And the journalist who reports a speech too cleverly makes it mean ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... And then the preceptor struck Dhananjaya at the breast with a long shaft shot with great force and capable of drinking the life-blood of every foe. Then Arjuna, deprived of strength, shook in all his limbs, like a hill during an earthquake. Soon, however, regaining his fortitude, Vibhatsu pierced Drona with many winged arrows. Then Drona struck Vasudeva with five arrows. And he struck Arjuna with three and seventy arrows, and his ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... His way of dealing with men. When Sodom was destroyed He brought righteous Lot out of it. But Sodom was destroyed, and in it many a little infant who had never known sin. And just so when Lisbon was swallowed up by an earthquake, ninety years ago, the little children perished as well as the grown people—just as in the Irish famine fever last year, many a doctor and Roman Catholic priest, and Protestant clergyman, caught the fever and died while they were piously attending on ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... less fuss. It wasn't as intricate to risk facing Monsieur Charretier as it was to eat soap and be seized with convulsions; so I went about my business, waiting upon her ladyship as if I had not been in the throes of a mental earthquake. She was not particularly cross, because the gentleman whose acquaintance I had thrust upon her might turn out to be Somebody, in which case my clumsiness would be a blessing in disguise; but if she had boxed my ears I should ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... 'Ephemeris' from my dressing-room, with a pen and ink.—We will put that down," continued he; and when the servant brought the book he wrote for a moment, reading aloud as he did so, "Great annular eclipse of the sun—slight shock of an earthquake felt in Cardigan—Sherbrooke ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... single discharge would destroy almost the whole fleet of an enemy." The Baron de Trott, to the great terror of the Turks, resolved to fire this gun. The shot weighed 1,100 pounds, and he loaded it with 330 pounds of powder: he says, "I felt a shock like an earthquake, at the distance of eight hundred fathoms. I saw the ball divide into three pieces, and these fragments of a rock crossed the Strait, and rebounded on ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 346, December 13, 1828 • Various
... old, and one was plump, and one was lean and dark; and their house chimed in with Scudder's notes; and half a mile off was lying a steam yacht with at least one German officer. I thought of Karolides lying dead and all Europe trembling on the edge of earthquake, and the men I had left behind me in London who were waiting anxiously for the events of the next hours. There was no doubt that hell was afoot somewhere. The Black Stone had won, and if it survived this June night would bank ...
— The Thirty-nine Steps • John Buchan
... difference between eras more marked in Conrad than in many of his contemporaries, because, like Melville, Hawthorne, and Poe, he avoids the plain prose of realism and sets his romantic heroes against the great powers of nature—tempests, the earthquake, solitude, and grandeur. Thus the contrast is marked by the very resemblance of romantic setting. For Conrad's tempests blow only to beat upon the mind whose behavior he is studying; his moral problems are raised only that he may ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... and consume the sacrifice. Holy Fire replied: "I come! I will consume the sacrifice, and then I will burn up the world!" It fell upon the Son of God, and rapidly consumed His humanity; but when it touched His deity, it expired. Then was there darkness over the whole land, and an earthquake shook the mountain; but the heavenly host broke forth in rapturous song—"Glory to God in the highest! on earth peace! good will ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 3 - Massillon to Mason • Grenville Kleiser
... more properly speaking, an earthquake wave, is an extraordinarily high wave, supposed to be formed by the disturbance caused by an earthquake in the bed ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 53, November 11, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... Charles the disciple of Lysippus constructed this brazen statue, the dimensions of which were so vast that a vessel could sail into the harbour between its legs, which spanned the entrance. It was partly demolished by an earthquake about eighty years after its completion; and so late as the year 672 of the Christian era, the brass of which it was composed was sold by the Saracens to a Jewish merchant of Edessa, for a sum, it is said, equal ...
— Smeaton and Lighthouses - A Popular Biography, with an Historical Introduction and Sequel • John Smeaton
... crowd in this street, Courtier, which of all crowds in the whole world can best afford to be left to itself; secure from pestilence, earthquake, cyclone, drought, from extremes of heat and cold, in the heart of the greatest and safest city in the world; and yet-see the figure of that policeman! Running through all the good behaviour of this crowd, however ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... proposed to annihilate Canada, dry up Niagara, and "fix British creation" generally, by diverting the current of Lake Erie, through a deep canal, into the Ohio River; but should nature, in one of her freaks of earthquake, ever cause a disruption to this intervening barrier on the southern shores of the great northern lakes, the drying up of Niagara, the annihilation of Canada, and the divers disasters to British power, will in all probability be followed ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... Bathe, [Banner-downe, near Bath- Easton.- J. B.] where a battle of king Arthur was fought, are great stones scattered in the same manner as they are on Durnham-downe, about Bristow, which was assuredly the work of an earthquake, when these great cracks ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey
... been there many years she dreamed a dream. And in the dream she seemed to have departed from the land of the Taurians and to dwell in the city of Argos, wherein she had been born. And as she slept in the women's chamber there befell a great earthquake, and cast to the ground the palace of her fathers, so that there was left one pillar only which stood upright. And as she looked on this pillar, yellow hair seemed to grow upon it as the hair of a man, ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... One sees," replied Ten-teh, with unmoved determination. "This person has long desired a son, and those who walk into an earthquake while imploring heaven for a sign are unworthy of consideration. Take this fish and depart until the morrow. Also, unless you would have the villagers regard you as not only deficient but profane, reveal nothing ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... the causeless animosity of some vague impersonality, continually on the watch to adjust the largest events of life so as to occasion her particular inconvenience. If half Paris and its environs had been destroyed by an earthquake, her first impression of the catastrophe would very possibly have been that it could not have happened at a worse moment for raising the price of early asparagus, though the further reflection that the general want of accommodation would justify her in doubling her hotel ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... Causeway smiles in scorn at Art's weak hand, Seem the wild waves ever singing of the high schemes Nature plann'd, When she hurled the giant columns, by some mighty earthquake shock, Till they stand, huge pillar-wonders, by the paved, mysterious rock; And the dark caves, weird and frowning, echoing the sea's wild strife, Seem to hold some spell unearthly, ...
— Lays from the West • M. A. Nicholl
... their authority, which at first they flattered, they might bring about the changes they had in view. To them it was indifferent whether these changes were to be accomplished by the thunderbolt of despotism or by the earthquake of popular commotion. The correspondence between this cabal and the late king of Prussia will throw no small light upon the spirit of all their proceedings.[98] For the same purpose for which they intrigued ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. III. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... of the story, is a boy whose mother is killed at his side by the fall of a church during an earthquake. The kindly clergyman and his wife, who adopt him, die while he is still very young, and he is thrown upon the world a second time. The narrative of his wanderings is full of interest and novelty, the boy's unswerving honesty and his passion for children and animals leading him into all sorts of ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... that, the moral effect of Alaric's capture of Rome was portentous, and shook the very foundations of civilization throughout the world. To Jerome, in his cell at Bethlehem, the tidings came like the shock of an earthquake. Augustine, as he penned his 'De Civitate Dei,' felt the old world ended indeed, and the Kingdom of Heaven indeed at hand. And in Britain the whole elaborate system of Imperial civil and military government seems to have crumbled to the ground ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... That night an earthquake shook the surrounding country and badly frightened the pirates, who were sleeping in one of the largest churches. Moreover, during the night the Spaniards turned the mountain streams through the streets of the town, apparently hoping to drive out the buccaneers, or ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... conversation gave Mormonism an advertisement and a support that had a wide effect, and it alarmed the orthodox of that part of the country as they had never been alarmed before. Referring to it, Hayden says, "The force of this shock was like an earthquake when Symonds Ryder, Ezra Booth, and many others submitted to the 'New Dispensation.'" Largely through his influence, the Mormon church at Kirtland soon numbered more than one ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... the beginning of September the shock of an earthquake was felt in London, and many other parts of England, as well as in France, Germany, and the Netherlands. Violent agitations of the same kind had happened about two months before in Sicily and Malta; and the town of Port-Royal in Jamaica ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... a noise as though the mountains really were shaking. The ground rocked; the walls shook; the chains were loosened from the stones; the stocks were wrenched apart; their hands and feet were free; the heavy doors crashed open. It was an earthquake. ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... and flourish, and grow up into a rank and poisonous crop, choking the good grain utterly, and corrupting the very soil of which they have taken hold. There is but one hope—but one! To tear them from the root forcibly, though the heart-strings crack, and the soul trembles, as with a spiritual earthquake. To nerve the mind firmly and resolutely, yet humbly withal, and contritely, and with prayer against temptation, prayer for support from on high—to resist the Evil One with the whole force of the intellect, the whole truth of the heart, and to stop the ears steadfastly ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... Wiclif's writings in May, 1382, an earthquake delayed the decision, and when the Council on June 7, 1415, would condemn Hus, a total eclipse of the sun delayed the proceeding. At one o'clock the sky was clear and Hus was again brought in, again in chains, and under guard. He was accused of denying ...
— John Hus - A brief story of the life of a martyr • William Dallmann
... with Russia unless the latter were definitely attacked; and France was weakened by the widespread strikes of 1907-8 and the vehement anti-militarist agitation already described. Further, Italy was distracted by the earthquake at Messina, and armed intervention was not to be expected from the Campbell-Bannerman Ministry. Bulgaria and Roumania were pro-Austrian. Turkey alone could not hope to reconquer Bosnia, and a Turco-Serb-Russian league was beyond the ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... was shorn of its beard, while the veil no longer might protect the modesty of the women. The impression made by such a succession of shocks upon a nation so bigotedly attached to its ancestral ways was comparable only to an earthquake rocking ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... papers ever used in book production. The native worms and insects thrived on it, and the heat and dampness took their slower but equally certain toll. Add to these enemies the acts of providence of which the Philippines have received more than their share—earthquake, fire and flood—and the man-made devastations of war, combined with the fact that there was no systematic attempt made in the Philippines to preserve in archives and libraries the records of the past, and it can well be understood why a scant handful of cradle-books have been preserved. ...
— Doctrina Christiana • Anonymous
... to the earthquake of 1812, the writer has followed the commonly received assumption, derived from Bancroft, that it occurred December 8, and that this date fell on a Sunday. From later research, it is now believed to ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter
... me planteel! I felt so idiotic sitting on the stairs hugging my knees and Mr. Craven, all splashed and muddy, waiting for me to let him pass—I was dreadfully frightened of him in those days," the faintest colour tinged her cheeks. "I longed for an earthquake to swallow me up," she laughed and scrambled to her feet, gathering the heap of furs into her arms and holding them dark and silky against her face. "You shouldn't have encouraged in me a love of beautiful furs, Aunt Caro," she said inconsequently, with sudden seriousness. ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... are always interesting. San Juan Capistrano was seriously injured by an earthquake in 1812; the tower was shaken so severely that it toppled over during morning mass, killing thirty of the worshippers, the priests escaping through the sacristy. It was the latest and costliest of the missions. "Its broken olive ...
— A Truthful Woman in Southern California • Kate Sanborn
... especially in old historical palaces and houses. And I have never been offered a room in a good English inn that had no windows to the open air. These windowless rooms may be forbidden as bedrooms by the German police, but it would take a bigger earthquake than the empire is likely to sustain to do away ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... Grant Adams came hurrying into Brotherton's store. As he strode down the long store room, Brotherton thought that Grant in his street clothes looked less of a person than Grant in his overalls. But the big man rose like a frisky mountain in earthquake and called: ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... Buckingham's house fell down last night with an earthquake, and is half swallowed up; won't you go and see it?—An April fool, an April fool, oh ho, young women. Well, don't be angry. I will make you an April fool no more till the next time; we had no sport here, because it is Sunday, and Easter Sunday. ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... kindly provided food for the mind during supper by describing to us a series of horrible scenes which had occurred at the time of the earthquake. He, too, had lost his wife and children by this calamity, and only owed his own life to the circumstance that he was absent at a sick-bed when the ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... feel an uneasy foreboding of the wrath which will surely come if they do not repent and turn unto the Lord their God? Go where we will we are conscious of that heaviness and oppression which is the precursor of the hurricane and the earthquake; none escape it: an all-pervading sense of rottenness and fearful waiting upon judgment is upon the hearts of all men. May it not be that this awe and silence have been ordained in order that the still small voice of the Lord may be the more clearly heard and welcomed as salvation? ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... short of an earthquake could remove the "Monthly Review." It looked as if Brodrick's magazine, for all its dangerous splendour, had come to stay, as if Brodrick, by sheer fixity and the power he had of getting what he wanted, would yet force the world to accept his preposterous ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... who was not legitimate, and not truly descended from Herakles. Agesilaus also said that Poseidon bore witness to the illegitimacy of Leotychides; for Agis was said to have been cast out of his bed-chamber by an earthquake, after which he abstained from approaching his wife, on religious grounds, for a period of more than ten months, at the end of which ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch
... the earthquake and the storm, Man's angry passions, war's terrific form, The tyrant's threatenings, and the people's rage, These are the crowded woes of ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... pressing, crushing against the other. Trampling recklessly over the fallen, amid groans and oaths and prayers and sudden shrieks, the enormous crowd vomited itself forth through the numerous passages. Whither should they fly? Some, anticipating a second earthquake, hastened to their homes to load themselves with their more costly goods and escape while it was yet time; others, dreading the showers of ashes that now fell fast, torrent upon torrent, over the streets, rushed under the roofs of the nearest houses, or temples, or sheds—shelter of any kind—for ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... after which we shall return to Rome. I was astonished at the remains of this city; I had no conception of anything so perfect yet remaining. My idea of the mode of its destruction was this: First, an earthquake shattered it, and unroofed almost all its temples, and split its columns; then a rain of light small pumice-stones fell; then torrents of boiling water, mixed with ashes, filled up all its crevices. A wide, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... powerful of all the giants who conspired against Jupiter. He was struck with a thunder-bolt, and covered with the heap of earth now called Mount Etna. The smoke of the volcano is the breath of the buried giant; and when he shifts his side it is an earthquake. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... That in the North. As for the South, a shrug of the shoulders expressed the national doubt of Calabria, Sicily,—the weaker, less certain members of the family. Remembering the dire destruction of the earthquake in the Abruzzi, which wrought more ruin to more people than the Messina catastrophe, also the floods that had destroyed crops in the fertile river bottoms a few weeks before, one could understand popular opposition ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... problems (no natural reservoir catchments, seasonal disparity in rainfall, and most potable resources concentrated in the Turkish Cypriot area); water pollution from sewage and industrial wastes; coastal degradation; loss of wildlife habitats from urbanization natural hazards: moderate earthquake activity international agreements: party to - Air Pollution, Endangered Species, Environmental Modification, Hazardous Wastes, Law of the Sea, Marine Dumping, Nuclear Test Ban, Ozone Layer Protection, Ship Pollution; signed, but not ratified - ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... stood at attention. This admirable man's face was constructed not with a view to the easy interpretation of emotions. I doubt if an earthquake in Carlton House Terrace and the vicinity could have ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... instances where sections of text are repeated, and these are preserved as printed. It may be that this book was published very hurriedly following the earthquake, and that these repetitions were ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... surrounded by mines; the town is built on mines; the ships moor over mines. The mines honeycomb the land in all directions, and extend in galleries of grottoes for two miles under the sea. By the falling in of the more ancient collieries numerous houses have been swallowed, as if by an earthquake, and a consternation spread, like that of Lisbon, in 1755. So insecure and treacherous was the site of the place now about to be assailed by a desperado, nursed, like the ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... dinner-party, or symposium, was a not unimportant, and not unpoetical, feature in the life of the sociable, talkative, tasteful Greek. Douglas Jerrold said that such is the British humour for dining and giving of dinners, that if London were to be destroyed by an earthquake, the Londoners would meet at a public dinner to consider the subject. The Greeks, too, were great diners: their social and religious polity gave them many chances of being merry and making others merry on good eating and drinking. Any public ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... Everything seemed to be crumbling, falling. That was the beginning. Within a minute the chaos spread, running over the city like fire on strewn gasoline. Buildings everywhere came crashing down. The street heaved up, cracking apart in long jagged lines of opening rifts as though an earthquake were splitting them. The subways and tubes and tunnels yawned like black fantastic chasms crossed and ...
— The White Invaders • Raymond King Cummings
... glad to see you back, although you have brought a nice hornet's nest about our ears, and started something like a social and religious earthquake in Kensington and the adjacent lands of Mayfair and Belgravia, to say nothing of a distinct fluttering in what I may, perhaps, without irreverence call the upper and more spacious dove-cotes of ...
— The Missionary • George Griffith
... while so well able to direct others, how incapable is he frequently found of guiding himself. His simplicity exposes him to all the insidious approaches of cunning; his sensibility, to the slightest invasions of contempt. Though possessed of fortitude to stand unmoved the expected bursts of an earthquake, yet of feelings so exquisitely poignant as to agonize under the slightest disappointment. Broken rest, tasteless meals, and causeless anxieties shorten life, and render it unfit for active employments; prolonged vigils and intense application still further contract his span, and ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... not fail to provide generous relief. This, however, does not mean restoration. The Government is not an insurer of its citizens against the hazard of the elements. We shall always have flood and drought, heat and cold, earthquake and wind, lightning and tidal wave, which are all too constant in their afflictions. The Government does not undertake to reimburse its citizens for loss and damage incurred under such circumstances. It is chargeable, however, ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... could dance better than he could at thirty, and to prove it executed, with extraordinary agility for a man who rode at twenty stone, a pas seul which made the floor rock and set the windows and ornaments to rattling as if there had been an earthquake. Suddenly, with a loud "Whew," he flung himself into an arm-chair, panting and perspiring. "It's you, sir," he gasped—"you put me up ...
— "George Washington's" Last Duel - 1891 • Thomas Nelson Page
... sovereigns of Bearn,—for none of whom, except the immediate family of the brave and bold Henry, need one care to be a champion—remained then a mighty heap of ruin, which every revolving year threatened to bring nearer to utter destruction; when another revolution, like an earthquake, whose shock may restore to their former place, rocks, which a preceding convulsion had removed, came to "renew old AEson:" Louis Philippe, to whom every nook and corner of his extensive kingdom seems familiar, so far from forgetting the berceau of his great ancestor, hastened to extend ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... months of July and October. These are sometimes accompanied by earthquake shocks. People may be injured or killed and their homes destroyed during these violent storms. Puerto Rico, however, is freer from them than other islands of ...
— A Little Journey to Puerto Rico - For Intermediate and Upper Grades • Marian M. George
... they tear the flesh of their victims, is portrayed to the life. We speak of a death-grip, but here is a death and life grip—death to the victim whose palpitating body furnishes life to its destroyer. It is the hot-cold-bloodedness of nature, the disregard for suffering of the tornado, the earthquake and the avalanche shown in little in the fangs and claws of these wild creatures. Then there are the battles of the more evenly-matched animals—not always as a result of the need of sustenance—such are the tiger transfixed by the elephant; ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, Jan-Mar, 1890 • Various
... part in these proceedings. He was discreetly quiet. He tended his store, and smoked his pipe, and watched events. One morning he was aroused from his slumbers by a tremendous crash—a crash that rattled the windows of his store and shook its very walls. He lay quiet a while, thinking that a small earthquake had been turned loose on the town. Then the crash was repeated; and he knew that Hillsborough was firing a salute from its little six-pounder, a relic of the Revolution, that had often served the purpose of celebrating the nation's birthday in ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... stand empty; and to me All these are nothing: priests and schools may doubt Who never have believed; but I have loved. Ah friends, I know it passing well, the love Wherewith I love; it shall not bring to me Return or hire or any pleasant thing— Ay, I have tried it: Ay, I know its roots. Earthquake and plague have burst on it in vain And rolled back shattered— Babbling neophytes! Blind, startled fools—think you I know it not? Think you to teach me? Know I not His ways? Strange-visaged blunders, ...
— The Wild Knight and Other Poems • Gilbert Chesterton
... and apparatus of sacrifice; even though no more than the big apples and vegetable marrows of the harvest festival be involved in it. There is the continued belief in a Deity who can and should be persuaded to change the weather, or who punishes those who offend Him by famine, earthquake and pestilence. Vestigial relics of all these phases can still be discovered in the Book of Common Prayer. There is further the undying vogue of the religious amulet. There is the purely magical efficacy which some churches attribute ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... organizes and gathers power, or makes one motion of its myriad hands towards the sceptre held by the autocrats of industry. When this class is maddened and revolts, civilization shakes and totters like cities when the earthquake stirs beneath their foundations. Can we master these arcane human forces? Can we, by any device, draw this submerged humanity into the light and make them real partners in the social order, not partners merely in the political life of the nation, but, what is of more importance, in ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... time came a crash of thunder, such as I hope never to hear the like of again. It was as if the whole of the granite island had been shivered to atoms by some awful volcanic crash; in fact, I thought it was an earthquake. It only lasted a few seconds, but it seemed to literally paralyze me; so much so, that I thought I should have fallen. Other flashes succeeded, one of them striking a granite block, which it shivered to pieces, although it weighed many tons, ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... Could it ever me come near In an earthquake's agonies? No; for though the flames should break As from some sulphureous lake, And the mountains' sides run red From the molten fires outshed, They could ne'er my courage ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... very serious this time," answered Leslie; "It is quite a novel experience to me, I admit; but there can be only one possible explanation of it, and that is that we have just sustained a shock of earthquake. If I am right in my surmise, this extraordinary disturbance of the sea will subside almost as rapidly as it has arisen, and that will be an end of the whole business. But, by Jove, I am not so sure that it will be, after all," he added in ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... of murky clouds generally observed over the surface of the Mediterranean previous to a violent storm or an earthquake. The ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... good invisible Amid the depths of discord's sea— That seem, alas! so dark to me! Oppressive to a mighty state, Contentions, feuds, the people's hate— But who dare question that which fate Has ordered to have been? Haply the earthquake may unfold The resting-place of purest gold, And haply surges up have rolled ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... of wit, Stephen said, and no truant memory. He carried a memory in his wallet as he trudged to Romeville whistling The girl I left behind me. If the earthquake did not time it we should know where to place poor Wat, sitting in his form, the cry of hounds, the studded bridle and her blue windows. That memory, Venus and Adonis, lay in the bedchamber of ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... which Adice's stream On this side Trento struck, should'ring the wave, Or loos'd by earthquake or for lack of prop; For from the mountain's summit, whence it mov'd To the low level, so the headlong rock Is shiver'd, that some passage it might give To him who from above would pass; e'en such Into the chasm was that descent: and there At point of the disparted ridge lay stretch'd The infamy ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... Day morning, 1755, when the whole populace, from beggar to priest, courtier to lackey, was making its way to church, the town of Lisbon was shaken to its foundations by an earthquake. The shock came about ten o'clock, just as the Misericordia of the mass was being sung in the crowded churches; and Frankland, who was riding with a lady on his way to the religious ceremony, was immersed with his companion in the ruins of some falling houses. The horses ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... some morning at breakfast you pick up a newspaper and read that a great earthquake has overwhelmed Messina, killing countless thousands and rendering an entire province desolate. You say, "How very terrible!"—after which you go blithely about your business, untroubled, undisturbed. But suppose that your little girl's pet ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... An earthquake in the second year of Rufus, followed two years later by a destructive November storm, impeded the progress, but in spite of all drawbacks and hindrances, builders and workmen toiled on, Henry I. ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock
... by me. The blow is received by me. It is given by me. Penelope is seated by me. The earthquake is felt by her. The evils are suffered by her. The thunder is heard by her. Does this mean that she is the agent, and the earthquake, evils, and thunder, are the objects which receive the effects ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... a parade and two performances a day, rain, shine, snow or earthquake," was the emphatic answer. "Come over to my tent in half an hour. I have something to say ...
— The Circus Boys on the Flying Rings • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... exile would have been the worst fate meted out to them. It is true that exile from Tuscany just then would have been attended by a similar difficulty to that which caused the old Scotch lady, when urged to run during an earthquake, to reply, "Ay! but whar wull I ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... descends into the bowels of the earth. Down, among the roots of the Eternal hills, he finds a sunless temple wherein he prays. And in the centre of it he finds a lighted temple in which he enters. Then there are noises as of an earthquake and smoke and fire in the darkness: and when he opens the door again he is in another temple, out of which he climbs into another world, leagues and leagues away. And when he asks the meaning of the vision, they talk gibberish and say, "It is ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... presented an interesting social aspect at this time. It was as if the precursive tremor of a moral earthquake had been felt, and people, only half awake, did not know whether to seek safety in the house, or outside of it. Women especially were perplexed and inquiring, and it was observed that those in favor of asking a recognition of their ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... wearily to himself—like a second-rate sketch; there was no sense of mystery as of a veiled city, but rather unreality. The shadows seemed lacking in definiteness, the outlines and grouping in coherence. A storm was wanted, he reflected; or even, it might be, one more earthquake on the other side of the world would, in wonderful illustration of the globe's unity, relieve the pressure on this side. Well, well; the journey would be worth taking even for the interest of observing climatic changes; but it would ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... geological ages they have exerted, how completely would the entire condition of the country be changed! What would become of the lofty houses, thickly-packed cities, great manufacturies (sic), the beautiful public and private edifices? If the new period of disturbance were to commence by some great earthquake in the dead of night, how terrific would be the carnage! England would be at once bankrupt; all papers, records, and accounts would from that moment be lost. Government being unable to collect the taxes, and failing to maintain its authority, the hand of violence and rapine would go uncontrolled. ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... villagers can never be easy that it will not tumble on top of them; and once a year regularly, and at odd times when the panic takes them, they march up and tie it with ropes. This very thing they were doing as we arrived, and all because some old woman had dreamed of an earthquake. We took notice that in the crowd and in the gang binding the stone there was no man the right side of fifty (barring a cripple or two); the reason being that all their young men had enlisted in ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... earthquake came and toppled over the whole fabric of trade and commerce in the West, reducing it to ruins. The entire West was devastated, and Ohio City received a blow from which, as a separate municipality, it never recovered. Among the others ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... his refined utterance, his gentle courage, which, with a different manner, might have been called audacity, his temperate statement of opinions which threatened to shake the existing order of thought like an earthquake. ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... dark, and all my companions were asleep, so I lay listening. The sounds came from a considerable distance, and the crash which had aroused me was succeeded by others much less formidable. The first explanation which occurred to me was that it was an earthquake; for, although the night was breathlessly calm, the broad river was much agitated and the vessel rolled heavily. Soon after, another loud explosion took place, apparently much nearer than the former one; then followed others. The thundering peal ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... empirically known in two ways only: by direct observation while they are in progress; and indirectly, by the study of the traces which they leave behind them. Take an earthquake, for example. I have a direct knowledge of it if I am present when the phenomenon occurs; an indirect knowledge if, without having been thus present, I observe its physical effects (crevices, ruins), or if, after these effects have disappeared, I read a description written by some one who ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... pawnbroker! She was a fencess, melter-downess, shoplifteress, smasheress, forgeress, coineress, everything that rhymes with dishonestness. The worst of all is, that her old beau, Bras-Rouge, is also arrested. I told you there was a real earthquake in the house." ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... stream quits the mountains and enters on the open country. Meanwhile, in the month of December, the magnificent Syrian capital, where Trajan had his headquarters, was visited by a calamity of a most appalling character. An earthquake, of a violence and duration unexampled in ancient times, destroyed the greater part of its edifices, and buried in their ruins vast multitudes of the inhabitants and of the strangers that had flocked ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... did. Paris coquetted with catastrophe as though it were an old mistress — faced it almost gaily as she had done so often, for they were acquainted since Rome began to ravage Europe; while New York met it with a glow of fascinated horror, like an inevitable earthquake, and heard Ternina announce it with conviction that made nerves quiver and thrill as they had long ceased to do under the accents of popular oratory proclaiming popular virtue. Flattery had lost its charm, but the ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... voice, saying, "I was late at my work, and I slipped and fell." The doctor, who looked troubled, gave directions; and when he went away he heard his man behind the door asking the doctor about the strange storm in the night, that had seemed like an earthquake, or as if a thunderbolt had struck the house. But the doctor said very gruffly, "It is no time to talk thus, when your master is sick to death." But Anthony knew in himself that he would ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... and luxuriant," as the modern traveller there still finds—it was visible at last, Lacedaemon, koile Sparte, "hollow Sparta," under the sheltering walls of Taygetus, the broken and rugged forms of which were attributed to earthquake, but without proper walls of its own. In that natural fastness, or trap, or falcon's nest, it had no need of them, the falcon of the land, with the hamlets (polichnia) a hundred and more, dispersed over it, in jealously enforced seclusion from ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... down on beautiful white houses built one over the other, and descending in terraces to the sea. Its old walls were dilapidated and discovered by the touch of time, and threatened every minute, as it afterwards did in the earthquake of 1769, to commence the awful avalanche of destruction that swept this fair city ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... descent! How barren! Desolate and rent By earthquake shock, the land lay dead, Like some proud king in old-time slain. An ugly skeleton, it gleamed In burning sands. The fiery rain Of fierce volcanoes here had sown Its ashes. Burnt and black and seamed With thunder-strokes and strewn With cinders. Yea, ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... of the elements, nor one of those terrible phenomena which Nature is capable of producing. No; man alone had produced those reddish vapours, those gigantic flames worthy of a volcano, those tremendous vibrations like the shock of an earthquake, those reverberations, rivals of hurricanes and storms, and it was his hand which hurled into an abyss, dug by himself, a whole ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... had any of these fancies he was in a fair way of being accommodated; for casting a glance up at the heavens as they approached the house, he saw that the obscurity was becoming still denser; and more than once, above the rumble of the carts and omnibuses that made Broadway one wide earthquake of subterranean noises, he caught a far-off booming that he knew to be the thunder of the advancing storm, already playing its fearful overture ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... to an American friend, a Southerner and a Christian, when the door was suddenly thrust open and a fiendish-looking man rushed in, vociferating, "Have you heard the news? Old Abe is assassinated! Seward too! Johnson escaped. Now if God will send an earthquake and swallow up the whole North—men, women, and children, I will say ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... Unrest. Strikes. Dissatisfactions. Change. The whole outlook was indescribably comfortless and depressing to her. She felt something akin to the vague, apprehensive misery—beyond reason or common sense—which people feel during the rumble of a distant earthquake. ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... not speak if there be no one to listen, for the Holy Ghost tells us "Where there is no hearing, pour not out words" (Eccli. xxxii. 6). God wishes a soul in converse with Him to be calm and still, for God is not in the earthquake (3 Kings, xix. ii.). Again, even if God speaks to an unmortified soul, it cannot hear Him as the passions fix its attention on worldly matters. And even when such a soul tries to listen and to understand, the passions ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley
... which means that some great personage is coming—then Joan of Arc stepped in, and the house rose! Yes, and tried to shut its indecorous mouth and make itself grave and proper; but when it saw the Maid herself go to laughing, it thanked God for this mercy and the earthquake ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... and no necessity for any one to do anything. The situation itself vanished in the financial crash as a building vanishes in an earthquake—here one moment and gone the next with only an ill-omened, slight, preliminary rumble. Well, to say 'in a moment' is an exaggeration perhaps; but that everything was over in just twenty-four hours is an exact statement. Fyne was able to tell me all about it; and the phrase that would ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad
... thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus? The old jest of one who tried to lift himself in his own basket, is but a tame picture of the man who imagines that, by working solely through existing sects and parties, he can destroy slavery. Mechanics say nothing, but an earthquake strong enough to move all Egypt can bring down ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... inhabitants buried it there to save it from the Goths: they were buried with it themselves; which is a caution we are not told that they ever took. You remember in Titus's time there were several cities destroyed by an eruption of Vesuvius, attended with an earthquake. Well, this was one of them, not very considerable, and then called Herculaneum. (195) Above it has since been built Portici, about three miles from Naples, where the King has a villa. This under-ground city is perhaps one of the noblest curiosities that ever has been ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... Perioeci despised the Spartiates, their masters. "Whenever one speaks to them of the Spartiates," says Xenophon,[62] "there isn't one of them who can conceal the pleasure he would feel in eating them alive." Once an earthquake nearly destroyed Sparta: the Helots at once rushed from all sides of the plain to massacre those of the Spartiates who had escaped the catastrophe. At the same time the Perioeci rose and refused obedience. The Spartiates' bearing toward the Perioeci was certain to exasperate ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... without the mess of pottage." However, on this memorable day, thus it was the union was ratified; the bill received the royal assent without a muttering, or a whispering, or the protesting echo of a sigh. Perhaps there might be a little pause—a silence like that which follows an earthquake; but there was no plain-spoken Lord Belhaven, as on the corresponding occasion in Edinburgh, to fill up the silence with "So, there's an end of an auld sang!" All was, or looked courtly, and free from vulgar emotion. One person only I remarked whose features were suddenly illuminated by a ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... shock of earthquake," he said blandly; "a mere thrill! I think," he added with a faint smile, "we may say that Nature herself has applauded our efforts in good old Californian fashion, and signified her assent. ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... house containing water, with a flexible tube which he could pass through a hole in the wall under the floor of Zeno's dwelling; he then lit a fire, which soon caused steam to pass through the tube in such a quantity as to make the floors to heave as if by an earthquake. But to return. We next come to Blasco de Garay (A.D. 1543), who proposed to propel a ship by the power of steam. So much cold water seems to have been thrown on his engine, that it must have condensed all his steam, as little notice is taken of it except that he got no ...
— Lectures on Popular and Scientific Subjects • John Sutherland Sinclair, Earl of Caithness
... earthquake destroyed his palace; he escaped, making his way through the ruins and roughly pushing aside the wounded who told about ...
— Common Sense - - Subtitle: How To Exercise It • Yoritomo-Tashi
... earthquake!") cried Tepi in terror-stricken tones, as he clutched the coamings and looked seaward. "Oh, Simi, look, look! The sea, ...
— The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton - 1902 • Louis Becke
... been stated that, in the year 1586, a colossal image of Buddha was erected by Hideyoshi at the Hoko-ji in Kyoto. This idol was made of wood, and the great earthquake of 1596 destroyed it. Subsequently, Ieyasu advised Hideyori to replace the wooden idol with a bronze one. Ono Harunaga stood opposed to this idea, but Katagiri Katsumoto, constant to his policy of placating Ieyasu, threw ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... pagan mind lie in ineffaceable and exaggerated grotesqueness the scars of impressions left by hereditary teaching, by natural phenomena and by the memory of events and of landmarks. Out of the soil of diseased imagination has sprung up a growth as terrible as the drunkard's phantasies. The earthquake, flood, tidal wave, famine, withering or devastating wind and poisonous gases, the geological monsters and ravening bird, beast and fish, have their representatives or ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... ideas, and never rules over them. Elijah stepped down from the exaltation of the God-accepted prophet on Carmel to be the murderer of the prophets of Baal, and was left to cowardice, to melancholy, and to wandering in the desert until taught by the fire, the wind, and the earthquake that he was not to bring human ...
— Peter the Hermit - A Tale of Enthusiasm • Daniel A. Goodsell
... is my brother; Mine eyes are the lightning; The wheels of my chariot Roll in the thunder, The blows of my hammer Ring in the earthquake! ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... Its bulk was beyond the mind, its lights were falling star systems, and its movements those of general cataclysm. I should find no care for little human needs there. One cannot warm one's hands against the flames of earthquake. There is no provision for men in the welter, but dimly apprehended in the night, of ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... English force and, daily expecting attack from an overwhelming force of Afghans, had spent three months in incessantly labouring to improve the fortifications of the town. Akbar Khan had approached within a few miles, and an onslaught of his army was supposed to be imminent. That morning an earthquake— ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... Philip's spoke another voice, And rung a blatant dirge to bluecoats, far [11]In old Virginia, with Lee's batteries. The miles of cotton rotted on the wharfs, And the Swamp Angel belled with distant shocks Like earthquake jars; There was heat-lightning in the sky That God had never made, From our sea-island batteries; And once a shell fell somewhere in the town With a despairing scream ...
— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen
... gallantry, General Waymouth made his compliments to the ladies whom Mrs. Presson had assembled to grace the occasion. Her little crust of social earth had been tossed alarmingly by the political earthquake, but she felt that now she was finding ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... reached a period when a great civil revolution seems to be at hand. Virginia is about to be shaken by an earthquake, to writhe under intestine wars, and it may be necessary for you to take sides. I warn you to have a care which side you choose, for a mistake means death. You had better know something of the condition of the country before you make ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... sleepy. Pee-wee said he wasn't exactly sleepy, but he guessed he'd lie down a little while. That was the end of him. If there had been an earthquake it wouldn't have stirred him. The only thing that could have awakened him would have been his own voice, only he doesn't talk in ...
— Roy Blakeley's Camp on Wheels • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... Christ, and Christopher resolved to serve Christ and Him alone. He died three days afterwards, and was canonized. The Greek and Latin churches look on him as the protecting saint against floods, fire, and earthquake.—James de Voragine, Golden ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... when that day shall come they shall be visited of the Lord of Hosts, with thunder and with earthquake, and with a great noise, and with storm, and with tempest, and with the flame ...
— The Book Of Mormon - An Account Written By The Hand Of Mormon Upon Plates Taken - From The Plates Of Nephi • Anonymous
... really inference from a small part of the facts before him. I feel a slight tremor run through the house with a little rattling of the windows, and assume that a train has gone by on the railroad below the hill a hundred yards away: as a matter of fact it may have been one of the slight earthquake shocks which come every few years in most parts of the world. The mistakes that most of its make in recognizing people are of the same sort: from some single feature we reason to an identity that ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... and renewed their not unreasonable or treasonable demands; but all in vain. There is really something awful about the strength and solidity and impassivity of England. When the French monarchy went down in the earthquake shock of that wild winter, and a republic came up in its place, it surely would have been no wonder if a vast tidal-wave of revolution caused by so much subsidence and upheaving had broken disastrously on the English shores. But it did ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... will be with thee when all else have gone. Mind, body, passion all wear out; not faith Nor truth. Keep thy heart cool, or rule its heat To fixed ends; waste it not upon itself. Not all the agony maybe of the damned Fused in one pang, vies with that earthquake throb Which wakens soul from life-waste, to let see The world rolled by for aye, and we must wait For our next chance the nigh eternity; Whether it be in ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... Brigmawl, which me and Brigmawl have been fellow-servants these eleven year, our head-waiter is that wrapped up in hisself, and his own cravats, and shirt-fronts, and gold studs, and Albert chain, that he'd scarcely take notice of an earthquake swallering up half the world before his eyes, unless the muck and dirt of that earthquake was to spoil his clothes. William Brigmawl has been head-waiter in this house nigh upon thirty year; and beyond a stately way of banging-to a carriage-door, or showing visitors ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... something like vertigo. Her senses seemed actually to fail her. She could do only the obvious thing. Dazed, she gave Lydia her arm, and automatically guided the older woman toward the upper deck. But that this astounding enterprise of hers should be thwarted by Lydia Lord! Not an earthquake, not a convulsed conspiracy of earth and sea, but this little teacher, in her faded little best, with her ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... Market street consisted mostly of vacant lots. Kohler & Chase's music house has been one of the most successful during all these years of changes which have come during all these years. They had nothing but successful advancement until our great earthquake demolished the entire city and they suffered as did other music houses, but at the present time of writing they are housed in a most magnificent building of their own on O'Farrell street and Bagley place, ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson
... the continents and islands, which might be raised at the same time above the surface of the water. In later days there are accounts of large stones falling from the sky, which may have been thus thrown by explosion from some distant earthquake, without sufficient force to cause them to circulate round the earth, and thus produce numerous small moons ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin
... and others down to Domenichino. Coming to our times, the only work found worthy of such companionship is that of Overbeck. The modern German does not suffer by comparison with the old Italian masters. The fresco was finished 1830; shortly after, an earthquake visited the spot and destroyed a large portion of the church, but The Vision of St. Francis remained intact. The cartoon for the picture is in the Library, Lubeck, framed, hung, but badly seen. I examined and noted it October 1880. It is in chalk, on paper mounted on canvas; ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson
... Nero accepted the offer; and, with his head covered, hiding his face with his handkerchief, he mounted on horseback, attended by four of his domestics, of whom the wretched Sporus was one. 7. His journey, though short, was crowded with adventures. An earthquake gave him the first alarm. The lightning from heaven next flashed in his face. Round him he heard nothing but confused noises from the camp, the cries of the soldiers imprecating a thousand evils upon his head. 8. ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... dumb cake, and reading destinies in tea-cups, and with a picture of a young woman with a high waist lying on a sofa in an attitude so uncomfortable as almost to account for her dreaming at one and the same time of a conflagration, a shipwreck, an earthquake, a skeleton, a church- porch, lightning, funerals performed, and a young man in a bright blue coat and canary pantaloons. Here, were Little Warblers and Fairburn's Comic Songsters. Here, too, were ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... a strange storm—darkness fell over the place—weird electrical disturbances manifested themselves. The winds abated and a strange quiet fell over all the scene, which was lighted by a ghastly glow. And then came the earthquake, with strange groanings and moanings of the earth; with frightful stenches of sulphur and gas. And the very foundations of Jerusalem quaked and shivered. The rocks before the tombs flew off, and the dead bodies were exposed to view. In the Temple, the veil ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... wave of excitement was created on the morning of December 12th by a slight earthquake; we were still further shaken up by the constant presence of the persistent venders whenever we were at the hotel, who even followed us to the station the hour of our departure for Delhi, when articles were purchased by us ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... prayer-meeting, where Lydia was converted. She furnished him a home while he continued his work in the city. After some time there arose great opposition to him and he and Silas were beaten and put in prison, but through prayer they were released by an earthquake which also resulted in the conversion of the jailer (Acts ch. 16). He perhaps visited them again on his journey from Ephesus to Macedonia (Acts 20 2 Cor 2:12-13; 7:5-6). He spent the Passover there (Acts 20:6) and received messages from them (Phil. 4:16). They also sent him ...
— The Bible Book by Book - A Manual for the Outline Study of the Bible by Books • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... me, or still call me dog?" Iskender seized her hand again, though she resisted furiously. But the words were cut in his mouth by a heavy hand which smote him sideways, deafening one ear; and when he recovered from sensations of a general earthquake, it was to find ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... gentle slope to the summit of the thundering mountain. But indications were not wanting of the peril with which the city was threatened. The whole district is volcanic; and a few years before the final catastrophe, an earthquake had shaken Pompeii to its foundations; some of the buildings were much injured. On August 24, A.D. 79, the inhabitants were busily engaged in repairing the damage thus wrought, when suddenly and without any previous warning a vast ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... painters, sculptors, and architects, though doubtless they were mostly of Greek origin. It is related of Ptolemy Philopator, that he sent a hundred architects to rebuild Rhodes, when it was destroyed by an earthquake. See vol. iii., ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... was Tom's answer. "Harm! What harm is likely to have come to him? Helstonleigh has not been shaken by an earthquake to-night, to swallow him up; and I don't suppose any greedy kite has descended from the skies and carried him off in her talons. You'll make a simpleton of that ...
— The Channings • Mrs. Henry Wood
... easily he advanced with lion step, pace by pace, whilst the earth shook withal; and as it shook, Kala naga aroused, was filled with joy, as his eyes were opened to the light. Forthwith he exclaimed: "When formerly I saw the Buddhas of old, there was the sign of an earthquake as now; the virtues of a Muni are so great in majesty, that the great earth cannot endure them; as step by step his foot treads upon the ground, so is there heard the sound of the rumbling earth-shaking; a brilliant light now illumes the world, as the shining of the rising sun; ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... of God. All these other things are but the fringes; the centre of glory is the Love, which is the mightiest and the divinest thing in the Might Divine. The sunshine is far stronger than the lightning, and there is more force developed in the rain than in an earthquake. That truth is what Christianity has made the common possession of the world. It has thereby broken the chains of dread; it has bridged over the infinite distance. It has given us a God that can love and be loved, can stoop and can lift, can pardon ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... grievous to be borne. When Guha saw the long-armed chief Whose eye was like a lotus leaf, With lion shoulders strong and fair, High-mettled, prostrate in despair,— Pale, bitterly afflicted, he Reeled as in earthquake reels a tree. But when Satrughna standing nigh Saw his dear brother helpless lie, Distraught with woe his head he bowed, Embraced him oft and wept aloud. Then Bharat's mothers came, forlorn Of their dear king, with fasting ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... Barren Butte and the foothills of Starvation. In the soft light of the afterglow it seemed to smile at him with a glint of malice, like the treacherous thing it was. For Furnace Lake is treacherous. The Big Earthquake (America knows only one Big Earthquake, that which rocked San Francisco so disastrously) had split Furnace Lake halfway across, leaving an ugly crevice ten feet wide at the narrowest point and eighty feet deep, men said. Time and passing storms had partly filled the gash, but it was there, ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... The sleeper stirred slightly but slept on. This was annoying. The ghost had no mind to make noise enough to disturb the neighbors. She laid the pie and the monkey-wrench on the counterpane, and shook the bed again, with the insistence of an earthquake. As she was endeavoring to resume her properties, Evalina sat up and clutched the bed clothes about her neck with a frenzied jerk. Patty just had time to save the pie—the monkey-wrench went to the floor with a crash; and the crash, to Patty's startled senses, was echoed and intensified from ...
— Just Patty • Jean Webster |
