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Peak   Listen
noun
Peak  n.  
1.
A point; the sharp end or top of anything that terminates in a point; as, the peak, or front, of a cap. "Run your beard into a peak."
2.
The top, or one of the tops, of a hill, mountain, or range, ending in a point; often, the whole hill or mountain, esp. when isolated; as, the Peak of Teneriffe. "Silent upon a peak in Darien."
3.
(Naut.)
(a)
The upper aftermost corner of a fore-and-aft sail; used in many combinations; as, peak-halyards, peak-brails, etc.
(b)
The narrow part of a vessel's bow, or the hold within it.
(c)
The extremity of an anchor fluke; the bill. (In the last sense written also pea and pee)
Fore peak. (Naut.) See under Fore.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Peak" Quotes from Famous Books



... who wasted powder so profusely, while a boy was despatched to the top of the look-out tree to ascertain his character. He reported a schooner anchored opposite Bangalang, sporting a long pendant at the main, and a white ensign at her peak. I took it for granted that no man-of-war would salute a native chief, and so concluded that it was some pretentious Frenchman, unacquainted with the prudent customs of ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer

... roared out to sea while Dr. Bird feverishly sounded the "Alnav" call on the radio sending set. In a few minutes an answer came. From their point of vantage they could see flags break out at the peak of the destroyer leader. The four ships turned into column formation and stormed at full speed into the bay. The plane raced ahead to ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various

... his friend; but he listened and watched as the four spoke together, and learned that Mr. Simpson had been made priest scarcely a month before, and was come from Yorkshire, which was his own county, to minister in the district of the Peak at least for awhile. He heard, too, news from Douay, and that the college, it was thought, might move from there to another place under the protection of the family of De Guise, since her Grace was very hot against Douay, whence so many of her ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson

... influenced the weather, spreading sunshine or clouds over the landscape, and sending good or bad hunting seasons. They were ruled by an old squaw spirit, said to be their mother. She dwelt on the highest peak of the Catskills, and had charge of the doors of day and night to open and shut them at the proper hour. She hung up the new moons in the skies, and cut up the old ones into stars. In times of drought, if properly propitiated, ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson

... The wind then shifted to the E.S.E. and carried us two hundred and twenty-four miles on our course in twenty-four hours. Then we had several days of contrary winds; on the 8th of February it hauled to the S.E., and on the 11th we saw the peak of a mountain covered with snow, which the first mate, who was familiar with these seas, told me was the summit of Mona-Roah, a high mountain on the island of Ohehy, one of those which the circumnavigator ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First American Settlement on the Pacific • Gabriel Franchere

... became lively and began to pull at her cable, as though impatient to be off, the moment that the hands tailed on to the throat and peak-halliards of her immense mainsail, and proceeded to hoist away; and when, having set the sail—which, by the way, was beautifully cut, and stood as flat as a board—we slipped, and hauled aft the jib-sheet, she ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood

... India-rubber, to throw the rain off down over the light waterproof cloaks; which each man carried in a small case, slung to his belt. The waterproof on the caps, when rolled up, did not show; the caps then looking like fur caps, with a peak. ...
— The Young Franc Tireurs - And Their Adventures in the Franco-Prussian War • G. A. Henty

... you he was in a proper rage, and if it hadn't been for Bayne I believe he would have trimmed me to a peak, administered ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor

... A jagged peak, which I named Mount Ragged, bore W. 10 degrees N., and a round topped one W. 30 degrees N. We were now actually beyond those hills; but the level bank, under which we had been travelling, prevented our seeing more of them than the bare outline of their lofty summits. The whole ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre

... a hunter, with every trail in the vicinity, and he took us through every romantic, winding path, one of which led us to an elevation commanding a view of Mount Shasta, the highest peak of the ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms

... awake from the sleep of the night only in winter and in the north. The sun shone on the white frost; the air was hazy enough to make the perspective of the fells more sharp, and leave a halo of mystery to hang over every distant peak and play about ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine

... reward. They had no sooner got down than indescribable cries for God to help them were heard. A rush was made to see what had happened. The lights were out, and nothing was visible. They groped their way to the peak ladder, and were nearly dead with fright when they reached the deck. When they had sufficiently recovered, they said that there was something in the peak alive, which kept butting up against them. They were sure it wasn't a man, and that it must be something evil. An ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman

... mean that I saw which side was right, or what solution was reliable, or any partisan points or repartees, or any practical details about practical difficulties. I mean that I saw what it was; the thing itself and the whole thing. The Labour problem of to-day stood up quite simply, like a peak at which a man looks back and sees single and solid, though when he was walking over it it was a wilderness of rocks. The Labour problem is the attempt to have the democracy of Paris without the slavery ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton

... stumbled along beside her, unseeing the objects that were nearest—the lovely shrubbery, beautiful flowers, and quaint little furnishings of that grand lawn—but with his eyes fixed on a distant mountain peak, bare of verdure, and seemingly but a mass of vari-colored rock; ...
— Dorothy on a Ranch • Evelyn Raymond

... hill was reached. It was not high nor difficult to mount, and at one point it seemed to spring up into a peak, the southern side of the point presenting a steep outline. The boys saw that on the side facing the river, which was less than a mile away, the precipitous portion was formed by a wall ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Tribesmen • Roger Finlay

... grille. His large hat with its tall wings sticking from the peak was green in the daytime. But now, illuminated only by a far off torchlight and by a glowworm coiled around the band, ...
— Rastignac the Devil • Philip Jose Farmer

... the squeaking of blocks and the rattle and scrape of rings as foresails were rushed up at peak and throat. Headsails raced into position, and, with the anchors cat-headed; the vessels, with their captains at the wheels or tillers, swung into the wind and ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams

... more entertaining this afternoon," Jimmie apologized on the way home. "It isn't that I am not happy, or that I don't feel the occasion to be more than ordinarily propitious; I'm silent upon a peak in Darien,—that's all." ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley

... ovoid, square, and multilateral holes, all about three feet at the mouth. Each hole on inspection showed that it was carefully shored internally with driftwood and bamboos, and over the mouth a wooden drip-board projected, like the peak of a jockey's cap, for two feet. No sign of life was visible in these tunnels, but a most sickening stench pervaded the entire amphitheatre—a stench fouler than any which my wanderings in Indian ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling

... felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific—and all his men Looked at each other with a wild surmise— Silent, upon a peak in Darien." ...
— Rhymes and Meters - A Practical Manual for Versifiers • Horatio Winslow

... upon a lofty peak, Looks to his right along the valley green, The pagan tribes approaching there appear; He calls Rollanz, his companion, to see: "What sound is this, come out of Spain, we hear, What hauberks bright, what helmets these ...
— The Song of Roland • Anonymous

... to represent forty-six miles from the point, based on the scale of miles shown at the foot of the map. With the pencil as a radius he drew a semicircle from Denver as the center. The curved line passed through Loveland, Long's Peak, and across the Snow Range to Tabernash. It included Georgetown, Gray's Peak, Mount Evans, and Cassell's. From there it swept on ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine

... the Longinuses and Aristotles of our newspapers, we have quite too many geniuses of the loftiest order to render a place among them at all desirable, whether for its hardness of attainment or its seclusion. The highest peak of our Parnassus is, according to these gentlemen, by far the most thickly settled portion of the country, a circumstance which must make it an uncomfortable residence for individuals of a poetical temperament, if love of solitude be, as immemorial tradition ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell

... under bridges of frozen snow, twines along the edges of inundated precipices to scale the adjacent mountains of Urdoz and Oleron, and at last rising over their unequal ridges, turns their nebulous peak into a new country which has also its mountains and its depths, and, quitting France, descends into Spain. Never has the hoof of the mule left its trace in these windings; man himself can with difficulty stand upright there, even with the hempen boots which can not slip, and the hook ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... between two and three thousand feet in height at the road-side,) but never getting entirely out of the Rocky-Mountain system till it reaches the Desert beyond Salt Lake. Even there it runs constantly among mountains; in fact, it never loses sight of lofty ranges from the moment it makes Pike's Peak till its wheels (metaphorically) are washed by the Pacific Ocean; but the mountains of the Desert may legitimately set up for themselves, belonging, as I believe, to a system independent of the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various

... tremendous feature which stood between us like an 'envious shade,' and intercepted all vision in that direction. To get out of the influence of this 'baleful planet' I shifted my head aside, and so did he, and we thus got a sight of each other over its peak. From that moment, all idea of eating was gone. The nose stood at first literally between my friend and me—and now it stood metaphorically between the fowl ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction No. 485 - Vol. 17, No. 485, Saturday, April 16, 1831 • Various

... torrent, turbid with autumn rains, rising from the precipice below; then suddenly the leafless chestnut woods are replaced, as at Vallombrosa, by a belt of black, dense fir plantations. Emerging from these, you come to an open space, frozen blasted meadows, the rocks of snow clad peak, the newly fallen snow, close above you; and in the midst, on a knoll, with a gnarled larch on either side, the ducal villa of Sant' Elmo, a big black stone box with a stone escutcheon, grated windows, and a double flight of steps in front. It is ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee

... of the Equator, while all the lowlands for thousands of miles around are occupied by a flora of a totally different character, is very extraordinary; and has only recently received an intelligible explanation. The Peak of Teneriffe, which rises to a greater height and is much nearer to Europe, contains no such Alpine flora; neither do the mountains of Bourbon and Mauritius. The case of the volcanic peaks of Java is therefore somewhat exceptional, but there are several analogous, if not exactly parallel cases, ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace

... true British tar. In one of his turns he was observed to make a full stop.—Immediately before the boiler his eye caught a cadaverous-looking countenance that rose between the top of a blue camlet cloak, and the bottom of a green travelling-cap, with a large patent-leather peak; he was certain that he knew it, and, somehow or other, he thought, not favourably. The passenger was in that happy mood just debating whether he should hold out against sickness any longer, or resign himself unreservedly to its horrors, ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees

... which when the moon is full is partially softened through the want of sharp contrasts of light and shadow. If we watch, even for half an hour only, the changing form of the ragged line separating light from darkness on the moon's disc, we cannot fail to be interested. "The outlying and isolated peak of some great mountain-chain becomes gradually larger, and is finally merged in the general luminous surface; great circular spaces, enclosed with rough and rocky walls many miles in diameter, become apparent; some with flat and perfectly smooth floors, variegated with streaks; ...
— Half-hours with the Telescope - Being a Popular Guide to the Use of the Telescope as a - Means of Amusement and Instruction. • Richard A. Proctor

... Chely d'Apcher to Rodez is like descending a snow- capped Alpine peak for the flowery, sunbright valley below. Instead of the stern grandeur of the Lozere, frowning peaks, sombre pine-forests, vast stony deserts and wintry blasts, we glide swiftly into a balmy region of golden vineyards, rich chestnut woods, softly murmuring streams, ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... position was manifest, for half a dozen men could defend such a path as this against a thousand, by placing themselves behind an angle and shooting down all who turned the corner; while the men from above reported that the peak shelved so rapidly towards the top of the sheer precipice, that it would be impossible to get near enough to the edge to see down into the amphitheater They reported, however, that stones and rocks set going would dash down below, and that points could be gained from which these ...
— Under Drake's Flag - A Tale of the Spanish Main • G. A. Henty

... observers and shelled by the Austrian guns. Practically all of the roads on the Italian side of the front are, remember, under direct observation by the Austrians. In fact, they command everything. Everywhere they are above the Italians. From the observatories which they have established on every peak they can see through their powerful telescopes what is transpiring down on the plain as readily as though they were circling above it in an airplane. As a result of the extraordinary advantage which the Austrians enjoy in this respect, it has ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell

... The side on which we stand, however, though steep, is not absolutely precipitous; on the contrary, the gradation of crag and projection, by which it descends to the bottom, is one of the finest things in the view. Close on our right a lofty peak presents its rocky face to the valley, to which it bears down in a magnificent mass, shouldering its way, as it seemed, half across it. The opposite sides appear more bare, precipitous, and lofty; and this last character ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 267, August 4, 1827 • Various

... sights on the big peak," said Riggs. "It looks to me as if they got a bearing on it from where they have stowed the gold, and Buckrow wants to get the same bearing from the beach and leave a marker as a middle point and a guide to where the treasure is concealed. The ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore

... from this grey boulder, Each high snow-peak, each rocky shoulder: Charming, yet wild, the sight. Cherry-trees, with white blossom laden, And 'neath their shade a peasant maiden, Comely her costume bright. —Oh, how these ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough

... Excelsior, there's nought we may not dare! Why, now, confess defeat, when plain in sight Looms the stern peak—to which we've toiled and fought Up many a mountain gorge and soaring height? It were a shame if we should now go back And, leaving all we've ...
— The Last West and Paolo's Virginia • G. B. Warren

... stay will be of short duration then," said Beverly, with a quick and apprehensive glance in the direction of the towering iceberg, upon the peak of which the last rays of the sinking sun glinted until it seemed to be ...
— Air Service Boys Over the Atlantic • Charles Amory Beach

... be of stones fitly set, brought down in ships from the land of 'les Yankees,' and it should have an airy belvedere, with a gilded image tiptoeing and shining on its peak, and from it you should see, far across the gleaming folds of the river, the red roof of Belles Demoiselles, the country-seat. At the big stone gate there should be a porter's lodge, and it should be a privilege even to ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable

... their movements, being wont to travel at purely "economical speed," and so we were given an excellent view of some of the Ionian Islands, steaming through the Ithaca channel, with the snow-tipped peak of Cephalonia ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne

... than his junior. "I am sure you will deserve success. To mortals is not given the power of commanding it." On the 15th Nelson sailed, having under his command three seventy-fours, a fifty-gun ship, three frigates, and a cutter. Towards sundown of the 20th the Peak of Teneriffe was sighted, distant fifty or sixty miles. The following morning the landing-party, a thousand strong, under the command of Captain Troubridge, was transferred to the frigates. The intention was to keep the line-of-battle-ships out of sight, while ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan

... mentally hungry in a negative kind of way. Yet it simply did not seem worth the trivial effort of will to decide whether he wanted to pick up a book or an orange or to press the syphon handle. So he lay there, inert, impassive, staring across the valley at the snows—peak beyond soaring peak, ethereal in the ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver

... is so placed in the Servian basin, that the eye embraces the whole breadth from Bosnia to Bulgaria, and very nearly the whole length from Macedonia to Hungary. When at length I stood on the highest peak, the prospect was literally gorgeous. Servia lay rolled out at my feet. There lay the field of Kossovo, where Amurath defeated Lasar, and entombed the ancient empire of Servia. I mused an instant on this great landmark of European history, and following the finger ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various

... there's no harm in those tears; and even if one has no grief, one's tears flow from joy. The tears flow of themselves, that's the truth. I used to go out to the shores of the lake; on one side was our convent and on the other the pointed mountain, they called it the Peak. I used to go up that mountain, facing the east, fall down to the ground, and weep and weep, and I don't know how long I wept, and I don't remember or know anything about it. I would get up, and turn back when the sun was setting, it was so ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... Venice made peace, and even, it is said, incited the Turks to the capture of Otranto. The Ottoman galleys were now free of the Adriatic, and carried fire and sword along the Italian coast, insomuch that whenever the crescent was seen at a vessel's peak the terrified villagers fled inland, and left their homes at the mercy of the pirates. The period of the Turkish Corsairs ...
— The Story of the Barbary Corsairs • Stanley Lane-Poole

... his own way. His great delight in people, and especially in the thrust and parry of controversial talk, held him from the solitary pleasures of fishing and hunting, so keenly relished by his two younger brothers. One of them said of him, "Frank can't even enjoy a view from a mountain-peak without wanting to call some one up to share it with him." He writes of his feeling about solitary nature to his friend George Dorr, in 1917, in connection with improvements for the new National Park, near Bar Harbor, "A wilderness, ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane

... Here we but peak and dwindle: The clank of chain and crane, The whir of crank and spindle Bewilder heart and brain; The ends of our endeavour Are merely wealth and fame, Yet in the still Forever We're one and all the same; Delaying, still delaying, We watch the fading ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley

... suggests the alternative routes He sought to find, before He resigned Himself to opening the path by His blood. Since His death there is "a new and living way" for those who know Him, which stretches from the lowest point of their abasement to the very peak of God's holiness. Up that way they can pass by repentance and trust, and down it the mercy of God hastens to meet and lead them. They are forever delivered from the sense of exclusion from God; the way lies open. But he who knows a path must himself walk ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin

... enough to catch the full glare of it. As it sweeps around the "Horseshoe Curve" of the Alleghanies or along the edges of the Sierra Nevadas, how far ahead, and how deep down, and how high up it flashes, and there is instantaneous revelation of mountain peak and wild beasts hieing themselves to their caverns and cascades a thousand feet tall, or clinging in white terror to the precipices! But more intense, more far-reaching, more sudden, swifter and more tremendous is the headlight of an advancing Judgment Day, under which all the most hidden ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage

... Kindly he admission gives. Of all kinds a single pair, And the members safely there Of his house he doth embark, Then at once he shuts the ark; Everything therein has pass'd, There he keeps them safe and fast. O'er the mountain's topmost peak Now the raging waters break. Till full twenty days are o'er, 'Midst the elemental roar, Up and down the ark forlorn, Like some evil thing is borne: O what grief it is to see Swimming on the enormous sea Human corses pale ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow

... individual term is, though the thing in question happens to be a group. A group is one thing, if we choose to think of it as one. For the mind, as we have already seen, has an unlimited power of forming its own things, or objects of thought. Thus a particular peak in a mountain chain is as much one thing as the chain itself, though, physically speaking, it is inseparable from it, just as the chain itself is inseparable from the earth's surface. In the same way a necklace is as much one thing as the ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock

... small in proportion to their great girth, and the whole tree looked very odd. These trees were all so alike in general form that I was convinced this was their character, and not a LUSUS NATUROE. [A still more remarkable specimen of this tree was found by Mr. Kennedy in the apex of a basaltic peak, in the kind of gap of the range through which we passed on the 15th of May, and of which he ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell

... terrifying. No man-made phenomenon of such tremendous power had ever occurred before. The lighting effects beggared description. The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray, and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to ...
— Trinity [Atomic Test] Site - The 50th Anniversary of the Atomic Bomb • The National Atomic Museum

... 186 A.D., the lesser work of the same name translated in 402 A.D. and the Sutra of meditation on Amitayus[83] translated in 424. The first of these works purports to be a discourse of Sakyamuni himself, delivered on the Vulture's Peak in answer to the questions of Ananda. He relates how innumerable ages ago there was a monk called Dharmakara who, with the help of the Buddha of that period, made a vow or vows[84] to become a Buddha but on conditions. That is to say he rejected ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... corner of the highest rocky peak was blasted out and the building was so placed that the wall of rock at the rear formed an excellent protection from the high west winds. By the first of October, last year, the building was ready for occupancy, and there ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various

... on you so unexpected-like? Let's say that I got tired of staring at the lonely grandeur of Pike's Peak, mon gars, or that the lady who gave me the pleasure of her society skipped for Denver with a younger man, or that the high altitude played Billy-be-damned with my nerves, and you'll have excuse enough. But the fact is, Pete, ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs

... upon her all her life, and deepened in the days of Queen Mary, when, as a notorious Protestant and heretic, she had had to hide for her life among the hills and caverns of the Peak, and was only saved, by the love which her husband's tenants bore her, and by his bold declaration that, good Catholic as he was, he would run through the body any constable, justice, or priest, yea, bishop or cardinal, who dared to serve the ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley

... have been reading little brown books on Evolution, and you don't believe in Catastrophes, or Climaxes, or Definitions? Eh? Tell me, do you believe in the peak of the Matterhorn, and have you doubts on the points of needles? Can the sun be said truly to rise or set, and is there any exact meaning in the phrase, 'Done to a turn' as applied to omelettes? You know there is; and so also you must believe in Categories, ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc

... octagonal base of forty feet diameter with inclined faces, from which rises a second octagonal portion of smaller size. A series of steps above this is crowned with a conical sheaf of palm-stems, whose fronds make an umbrella of twenty feet diameter. The peak is a pinnacle of bamboos, with a Dutch flag pendent in the still atmosphere of the hall. From each angle and side of the octagon radiates a table, and these are lavishly covered with specimens of the arts ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various

... again its stiff wheels and their trunks swayed gently. Martin Cunningham twirled more quickly the peak ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... all," Charles thought, "when the blood beats high Comes the glimpse of that which may not die; When the world is stilled, when the wanting dwindles, When the mind takes light and the spirit kindles, One stands on a peak of ...
— Right Royal • John Masefield

... ocean is visible is a six days' ordinary march, but he only covered the distance in twenty-five days, after many adventures and great privations. On the seventh day of the calends of October, a Quarequa guide showed him a peak from the summit of which the southern ocean is visible. Vasco looked longingly at it. He commanded a halt, and went alone to scale the peak, being the first to reach its top. Kneeling upon the ground, ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt

... (the short ascent of the last peak) similar veils drew themselves across the sun, and at each passage the splendid phenomena were renewed. There seemed a tendency to form circular zones of color round the sun; but the clouds were not sufficiently uniform to ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin

... meeting in a place among the mountains in Hardy County, Virginia, called the Cove. This consists of an area of country so nearly enclosed by mountains of a somewhat circular form that it has but one outlet both for its streams and its inhabitants. Viewed from the summit of some neighboring peak it has the appearance of a vast amphitheatre whose dome is the sky, whose floor is a variegation of corn and wheat fields interspersed with beautiful green meadows, and whose walls are the substantial mountain masonry of nature's own sublime ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline

... an "excess of virility." "Men of this surcharge of arterial blood cannot live on nuts, herb-tea, and elegies; cannot read novels and play whist; cannot satisfy all their wants at the Thursday Lecture and the Boston Athenaeum. They pine for adventure and must go to Pike's Peak; had rather die by the hatchet of the Pawnee than sit all day and every day at the counting-room desk. They are made for war, for the sea, for mining, hunting, and clearing, and the ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers

... suddenly there was a flash as if some one had turned a large golden mirror in the field down beyond to the right. A little column of black smoke drifted away from one of the Japanese trenches, and a minute later those of us on the peak of Prinz Heinrich heard the sharp report of a ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various

... king in a small viewfinder; of the Colonel on my right saluting, with a fearful waggle of the hand, without his hat on, that article having been simply swept off by my own tremendous "circular-motion-thumb-close-to-the-forefinger-touching-the-peak-of-the-cap, etc., etc." Through the haze I saw HIS MAJESTY graciously return our salute and I seem to recollect Vee taking his salute as a personal compliment to the feminine element in the car, and smiling back delightedly ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 15, 1919 • Various

... deal of poetry and very little plain prose written about the valley of Mexico. At an early morning hour I stood upon the heights of Rio Frio; at another morning, as already said, at the Cross of the Marquis; again, upon the highest peak of the Tepeyaca, behind Guadalupe, I saw a tropical morning sun disengage itself from the snowy mountains. From these three favored spots I have looked upon the valley, where dry land and pools of water seemed equally to compose the magnificent panorama. Immense mirrors of ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson

... cut it off? I'll make my head as smooth as yonder bald-headed mountain-peak if it'll keep you from crying. Course you ain't seen nobody with whiskers amongst them Indians, but THEY ain't your people. Your people is white, they are like me, they grows hair. But I'll shave and paint myself red, ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis

... sharp," or rising to a peak, is of course somewhat exaggerated as applied to dust. The commentators explain the phenomenon by saying that horses and chariots, being heavier than men, raise more dust, and also follow one another in the same wheel-track, whereas foot-soldiers would be marching in ranks, many abreast. According ...
— The Art of War • Sun Tzu

... line; barer the shore wall, with never a break to the eye till you turn some jagged peak and come on one of those snug coves where the white fisher hamlets now nestle. Reefs white as lace fret line the coast. Lonely as death, bare as a block of marble, Gull Island is passed where another crew in later years perish as castaways. Gray finback whales ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut

... enjoyin' without you, wouldn't I," she observed. "While I was lookin' at the scenery I'd be wonderin' what you had for breakfast. Every mite of rain would set me to thinkin' of your gettin' your feet wet and when I laid eyes on a snow peak I'd wonder if you had blankets enough on your bed. I'd be like that yellow cat we used to have back in the time when Father was alive. That cat had kittens and Father had 'em all drowned but one. After that you never saw the cat anywhere unless the kitten was there, too. She wouldn't ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln

... slowly deliquescing. This zone of mountains and valleys is from ten to twenty miles in width, and whilst in the main its mountains are not more than from half a mile to a mile high, it contains peaks of five or six miles in height, and there is one peak which rises nine miles ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake

... the Patagonians exhibit no exaggeration of height—in fact, some of the inhabitants about Terra del Fuego are rather diminutive. This superstition of the voyagers was not limited to America; there were accounts of men in the neighborhood of the Peak of Teneriffe who had 80 teeth in their head and ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... the Hinchinbrook pinnacle. Some local blacks regard it with awe, believing that it covers a deep hole in the mountain in which the winds and rain are pent up. When a malignant "debil-debil" lifts the peak away the elements escape, roaring and hissing with anger and mischief. When tired, they retire sulkily to the hole, which the "debil-debil" blocks with the monstrous rock. Fine weather then prevails, and the rock, which has been hidden away ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield

... was in sight. Several others, climbing up the rigging, confirmed his report; and in a few moments more word was sent to the same effect by Andrew Doria, who commanded on the right. There was no longer any doubt; and Don John, ordering his pendant to be displayed at the mizzen-peak, unfurled the great standard of the League, given by the pope, and directed a gun to be fired, the signal for battle. The report, as it ran along the rocky shores, fell cheerily on the ears of the confederates, who, raising ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various

... case had been given them. They had been asked to proceed to the city of Green River, in the state of Wyoming, and there secure burros, provisions and tents and travel to the valley lying south and west of Altantic peak. ...
— Boy Scouts on the Great Divide - or, The Ending of the Trail • Archibald Lee Fletcher

... devotion itself to the families of the officers when sickness and trouble came, as come in the old days they too often did. It was she who took poor Ned Robinson's young widow and infant all the way to Cheyenne when the Sioux butchered the luckless little hunting party down by Laramie Peak. It was she who nursed Captain Forrest's wife and daughter through ten weeks of typhoid, and, with her own means, sent them to the seashore, while the husband and father was far up on the Yellowstone, cut off from all communication in the big campaign of '76. It was she who ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King

... glanced up at the lofty peak of the flag-staff, then began removing his shoes and stockings. He was up the pole the next moment like a squirrel, clinging fast with arms and bare toes. Half-way up he rested, by clutching the halyard and twisting ...
— The Rival Campers Ashore - The Mystery of the Mill • Ruel Perley Smith

... but to submit to fortune with his best air. He stood erect; a slanting beam from the window glimmered on his tall, bald head, and his face was black and menacing as the summit of a thunder-crowned peak. ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... caps, an ell long, which hang bobbing over the side (schief): their shoes are peaked in front, also to the length of an ell, and laced on the side with tags; even the wooden shoes have their ell-long noses: some also clap bells on the peak. Further, according to my authority, the men have breeches without seat (ohne Gesaess): these they fasten peakwise to their shirts; and the long round ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle

... China far beyond the Salween gorge, form a continuous barrier and boundary, and tail off into a narrow range which forms the eastern watershed of the Salween and separates Tenasserim from Siam. The highest peak of the Arakan Yomas, Liklang, rises nearly 10,000 ft. above the sea, and in the eastern Kachin hills, which run northwards from the state of Moeng Mit to join the high range dividing the basins of the Irrawaddy and the Salween, are two peaks, Sabu and Worang, which ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... diffused light, paler than the sparks, yet of the same yellow-white hue, which floated quietly past, seeming a foot or two below the foam. And at the bottom, far beneath, deeper under our feet than the summit of the Peak of Teneriffe was above our heads—for we were now in more than two thousand fathoms water—what exquisite forms might there not be? myriads on myriads, generations on generations, people the eternal darkness, ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley

... more serious. It was some months afterwards, and by this time she was in despair about David, and had made up her passionate mind that she would never see him again. But she loathed Hannah more and more, and at last, in the middle of a snowy February, the child determined to find her way over the Peak into the wild valley of the Woodlands, and so to Ashopton and Sheffield, in which last town she meant to go to service. But in the effort to cross the plateau of the Peak she very nearly lost her life. Long before she came in sight of the Snake Inn, on the Woodlands side, she sank exhausted ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... across it," agreed Ernest. "In fact, there hasn't been any trail for the last mile. But we can't miss our way. That white peak with three points is at right angles anyhow to us, as it ought ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie

... year have made still further progress in recuperation from the war, with large rains in efficiency and ability expeditiously to handle the traffic of the country. We have now passed through several periods of peak traffic without the car shortages which so frequently in the past have brought havoc to our agriculture and industries. The condition of many of our great freight terminals is still one of difficulty and results in imposing, large costs on the public for inward-bound freight, and on the railways ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Calvin Coolidge • Calvin Coolidge

... From Ida's peak high Jove beheld The tumults of the battle-field, The fortune of the fight— He marked, where by the ocean-flood Stout Hector with his Trojans stood, And mingled in the strife of blood Achaia's stalwart might: He saw—and turn'd ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker

... [Adam's Peak] abounds with rubies of all kinds and other precious stones. These gems are being continually washed out of the ground by heavy rains, and are sought for and found in the sand carried down the hill by the torrents. It is currently reported among the people, that these precious stones are ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... Forsythe, looking at the big shoulders of Sampson. "But, inasmuch as I knew this fellow from boyhood, and knew this little girl when a child, the best care I can give her is to remove this chap from her vicinity. We'll put him down the fore peak, and let one o' the cooks feed her ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson

... news from the Americans at bay in the wilds of the Klamath. By courier the Don has heard of Castro's feeble moves. He toils along with his cavalry, guns, and foot soldiers, whom Fremont defied from behind the rocky slopes of Hawk's Peak. The ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage

... its ice mantle and afterward don it again in such a manner as to hide its true character even on a near view;" and, on the other hand, "a voyager not familiar with volcanoes might easily mistake the cloud-bonnet of a peak for the smoke of a volcano." This, however, will not account for Zeno's "hill that vomited fire," for he goes on to describe the use which the monks made of the pumice and ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske

... feet or more. It stood out bold, cold, and clear against the blue sky, and looked beautifully white with a fresh covering of new snow, and it was more than usually distinct, from being clear of the cloud-crown it usually wears. In the evening the massive peak presented a splendid appearance, looking as in a white heat from the shine of the setting sun, which, though lost to view below the horizon, yet lighted up ...
— Persia Revisited • Thomas Edward Gordon

... the breezy dells, enamelled with flowers and grass, become fewer; the great black pines take their place. Right before us, in the purest white, as a bride adorned for her husband, rises the beautiful Jungfrau, wearing on her forehead the Silver Horn, and the Snow Horn. The Silver Horn is a peak, dazzlingly bright, of snow; and its crest is now seen in relief against a sky of the deepest blue. See, also, how those dark pines of the foreground contrast with it, like the stern, mournful realities of life seen against the dazzling ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... sewed it up on him; then, withdrawing to a fair distance, hid himself. And after an hour a great bird swooped down from the lift and, snatching up the carcass in his pounces soared high toward the sky. Then he perched upon the mountain peak and would have eaten the prey, but Janshah sensing his intent took out his knife and slit the mare's belly and came forth. The bird was scared at his sight and flew away, and Janshah went up to a place whence he could see below, and looking down, espied the merchant ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton

... challenge of the mountains with their unsealed heights of peak and dome and impassable barriers of rugged crag and sheer cliff. It was not the glad challenge of the untamed wilderness with its myriad formed life of tree and plant and glen and stream. It was not the noble challenge of the wide-sweeping, ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright

... Mount Soracte, white with shining snow, the peak whose distant cold gave zest to the blazing logs on the hearth of Horace. Within sight of his windows was practised, by men calling themselves 'wolves' (Hirpi), a rite of extreme antiquity and enigmatic character. On a peak of Soracte, now Monte di Silvestre, stood the ancient temple of Soranus, ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang

... same dread. There were now four adult forward officers in the Josephine; but the old boatswain was the only one who inspired any special terror. Little's brilliant scheme to enable his small party to escape seemed to be endangered by Peak's coming, for he was an exceedingly prompt, decided and vigilant man. The four old sailors, on an emergency, ...
— Down the Rhine - Young America in Germany • Oliver Optic

... ago, they now eat out of his hand. You've really no notion what a feeling of quiet pride it gives you owning a paper. I try not to show it, but I seem to myself to be looking down on the world from some lofty peak. Yesterday night, when I was looking down from the peak without a cap and gown, a proctor slid up. To-day I had to dig down into my jeans for a matter of two plunks. But what of it? Life must inevitably be dotted with these minor tragedies. I do not ...
— Psmith, Journalist • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... scraped of their corroding rust, ventilators are washed and painted, and all the deck-houses are cleansed of a coating of coal-dust which seems appalling. As the days drone by the filth disappears; pots of red, white, brown, and black paint come out of the Mate's secret store in the "fore-peak," and one hears satirical approval from those below. "Like a little yacht, she is," says one, and the Second Mate is asked if he has a R. Y. S. flag in the chart-room. I fear the wit who called the engine-room a whited sepulchre had some smack of truth in him. ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee

... understanding the ante-war Japan. Grateful am I, as well, to the legion of tireless writers attracted to the East by recent strife and conquest, who have made Fuji more familiar to average readers than any mountain peak in the United States; who have made the biographies of favorite geishas known even in our hamlets and mining camps, and whose agreeable iteration of scenes on Manila's lunetta compel our Malaysian capital to be known as well as Coney Island and Atlantic City—they have so graphically ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield

... divided by the southern extremity of Lake Leman, which was spanned by many handsome bridges. In the centre, a little isle, with Rousseau's statue. A little beyond, the Rhone rushed frothing and foaming out of the lake. From my window I could see in the distance the dazzling snow peak of Mont Blanc. ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes

... with the up and down platforms facing each other, so the up platform was further back, facing the harbour, and this down platform was overshadowed on its landward side by smoke-grimed cottages and tenements which rose on high ground in a peak of squalor. Seawards one looked over a goods-siding, where there stood a few wagons of cockle-shells and a cinderpath esplanade on to ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West

... the shades of night. Looking round, I shuddered at a craggy mountain, clothed in dark forests and almost perpendicular, that was absolutely to be surmounted before we could arrive at Wallersee. No house, not even a shed appearing, we were forced to ascend the peak, and penetrate these ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford

... magazines. And through the middle of it all, in single file—their topmasts, yards, and cordage showing above the murk as pale and dumb as skeletons at every flare of the havoc, a white light twinkling at each masthead, a red light at the peak and the stars and stripes there with it—Farragut and his wooden ships came ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable

... the dedication of Minerva's temple in her old home. Inside the spacious Roman portico, with its columns of African marble and its wonderful images of beasts and mortals and gods, and in front of the gleaming temple, with its doors of carven ivory and the sun's chariot poised above its gable peak, she had been conscious chiefly of a longing to see once more the homely market-place of Assisi, to climb the high steps to the exquisite temple-porch which faced southward toward the sunbathed valley, and then to seek the cool dimness within, where ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson

... in his throat as if he were gulping down the phrase and, fumbling at the peak of his tweed cap, ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce

... they turned out, they never looked at the sky or the direction of the wind; they instinctively turned to The Duncans, and if the Blue Peter was not at her fore peak they made arrangements for spending still ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton

... to-day, if he would remain faithful to his ideas, should picture to himself the unknown into which death flings us. Let us confine ourselves here to the last struggle. As science progresses, it prolongs the agony which is the most dreadful moment and the sharpest peak of human pain and horror, for the witnesses, at least; for, often, the sensibility of him who, in Bossuet's phrase, is "at bay with death," is already greatly blunted and perceives no more than the distant murmur of the sufferings which he seems to be ...
— Death • Maurice Maeterlinck

... person save by Jacob himself. Moreover, part of this is not Jacob but Richard Bonamy— the room; the market carts; the hour; the very moment of history. Then consider the effect of sex—how between man and woman it hangs wavy, tremulous, so that here's a valley, there's a peak, when in truth, perhaps, all's as flat as my hand. Even the exact words get the wrong accent on them. But something is always impelling one to hum vibrating, like the hawk moth, at the mouth of the cavern of mystery, endowing Jacob Flanders with all sorts of qualities he had not at all—for ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf

... boa, and a deep red rose in her bosom. The maitre d'hotel, in the pride of reflected glory, conducted her to a table near the window. Septimus trailed inconclusively behind. When he seated himself he stared at her silently in a mute surmise as the gentlemen in the poem did at the peak in Darien. It was even a wilder adventure than the memorable drive. That was but a caprice of the goddess; this was a sign of her friendship. The newness of their intimacy smote him dumb. He passed his hand through his Struwel Peter hair and wondered. Was it real? There sat the goddess, ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke

... situation we had two ice islands in sight, one of which seemed to be as large as any we had seen. It could not be less than two hundred feet in height, and terminated in a peak not unlike the cupola of St Paul's church. At this time we had a great westerly swell, which made it improbable that any land should lie between us and the meridian of 133 deg. 1/2, which was our longitude, under the latitude we were now in, when we stood to the north. ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook

... became gentle, but these desperate men could not be tamed. The wild animals, and particularly the stags and hinds, are so abundant, owing to the little molestation they receive, that in our time, in the northern parts of the island towards the Peak, (17) when pursued by the hounds and hunters, they contributed, by their numbers, ...
— The Description of Wales • Geraldus Cambrensis

... shadows around and below every prominence, and each peak had a crown of light, while all the rest of the island remained ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893

... while their cutlasses lay by their sides. To remove the latter might be difficult without making a noise, and it was, besides, considered of less importance to get hold of them. Stealing silently across the fore-peak, Gerald and Dan reached one of the bunks; Dan then leaning over, felt for the occupant's pistol, which he carefully unhooked and handed to Gerald, who, almost breathless with eagerness, grasped it tightly. They then went to the next berth, and possessed themselves of the ...
— The Missing Ship - The Log of the "Ouzel" Galley • W. H. G. Kingston

... anxious 'bout it, Mister Carlyle," he replied gruffly, plucking awkwardly at the peak of his cap. "I'm a seaman, sir, an' know my duty, an' so I'll go 'long if yer wus ter order me to. Yer know that; but I ain't fergot yet this yere is a cholera ship, an' it's goin' ter be as black as night down thar ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish

... or road, which skirted Sombrero Peak, the mass of multicolored rock at Ted's back, over which he had come on his way from San Carlos to the Bubbly Well ranch house, which he was now facing in the distance. But where he was now standing the road branched off to the west, ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor

... wooded to the peak, the lawns And winding glades high up like ways to Heaven, The slender coco's drooping crown of plumes, The lightning flash of insect and of bird, The lustre of the long convolvuluses That coil'd ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various

... the peak of outlook on life to the homely labor of cooking supper, some of the healthy heroic flush of the knightly days and the hearth-fire went down with her, I think. It brightened and reddened the square kitchen with its cracked stove and meagre array of tins; ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis



Words linked to "Peak" :   hit, arrive at, visor, tiptop, bloom, Handies Peak, North Peak, sword, top out, lower limit, crest, flush, pinnacle, cone shape, gain, lift, steel, degree, place, stage, level, extreme, meridian, summit, extreme point, peaky, yachting cap, top, extremum, bottom out, eyeshade, brow, bill, arrowhead, pencil, limitation, Adam's Peak, period of time, minimum, limit, time period, Pike's Peak, point, efflorescence, jockey cap, Uncompahgre Peak, roof peak, golden age, kepi, hilltop, Pobedy Peak, peaked cap



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