"Teem" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the earth has at length flooded its surface with this seething tide of life; when the air is filled with a thousand species of insects, and the forest-floor feels the heavy tread of the giant salamander and the light feet of spiders, scorpions, centipedes, and snails, and the lagoons and shores teem with animals, the Golden Age begins to close, and all the semi-tropical luxuriance is banished. A great doom is pronounced on the swarming life of the Coal-forest period, and from every hundred species of its animals and plants only two or three will ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... the tilth of fields and stars of heaven; Now will I sing thee, Bacchus, and, with thee, The forest's young plantations and the fruit Of slow-maturing olive. Hither haste, O Father of the wine-press; all things here Teem with the bounties of thy hand; for thee With viny autumn laden blooms the field, And foams the vintage high with brimming vats; Hither, O Father of the wine-press, come, And stripped of buskin stain thy bared limbs In the new must with me. First, nature's law For generating ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... revolutions occur. If the forest is cut off, the sprouts and bushes which spring up afford them concealment, and they become more numerous than ever. That must be a poor country indeed that does not support a hare. Our woods teem with them both, and around every swamp may be seen the partridge or rabbit walk, beset with twiggy fences and horse-hair ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... chronicler, Olivier de la Marche, though to him, also, came intimations that he would find a pleasant welcome at the French court. He, too, had opportunities galore to make links with Louis. The accounts teem with references to his secret missions here and there, and with mention of the rewards paid, all carefully itemised. So zealous was this messenger on his master's commissions, that his hackneys were ruined by his fast riding and had to be sold for petty sums. ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... clearing her coffee, that, "it gives a kind of bright taste to it; takes off the flatness-like, don't you know?" We raise more vegetables and in greater variety than any other people; have better and cheaper fruits than can be procured in any other market upon the globe; our waters teem with fish (unsalted) that may be had for the catching. Yet our national cuisine—take it from East to West and from North to South—is the narrowest as to range, the worst as to preparation, and the least wholesome of any country that ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... the blind bathybus lies. Fecundity flings her seeds and spores into the glazed abysses, and they teem. There is a heaving in the broken, sunless bottoms; the continents and islands are upcast, rugged and black, shaking the ...
— The Masque of the Elements • Herman Scheffauer
... pictures of city affairs, life in the Wild West, among the cowboys and Indians, thrilling rescues along the seacoast, the daring of picture hunters in the jungle among savage beasts, and the great risks run in picturing conditions in a land of earthquakes. The volumes teem with adventures and will be found interesting ...
— The Girls of Central High on Lake Luna - or, The Crew That Won • Gertrude W. Morrison
... mighty predecessors, they are no less exempt from the obscenity and immoral effects of those authors. As bad writing is infinitely easier than good, the pens of our living dramatic writers in general teem with an inconceivable fertility—and the purlieus of London are beat over in every direction to hunt up game suitable to the genius of their weak-winged muse; in short, to find out new modifications of character, attractive ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... banks and swims over those levels to the feet of those hills, and when it recedes it leaves the cornfields enriched for the crop that, has never failed since the forests were first cut from the land. Other fertilizing the fields have never had any, but they teem as if the guano islands had been emptied into their laps. They feel themselves so rich that they part with great lengths and breadths of their soil to the river, which is not good for the river, and is not well for the fields; so that the farmers, whose ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... this assurance thus solemnly given that we won the reluctant consent of Mexico to part with California. It gave us a domain of more than imperial grandeur. Besides the vast extent of that country, it has natural advantages such as no other can boast. Its valleys teem with unbounded fertility, and its mountains are filled with inexhaustible treasures of mineral wealth. The navigable rivers run hundreds of miles into the interior, and the coast is indented with the most ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... need to be crossed. In fact it is a dead level to Fort Yuma, and, in consequence, no grading is necessary. There is scarcity of water, but the soil in general is excellent and grass abounds all along the line, while the mountains teem with minerals of the richest description. The oxides and the sulphurets of copper are the most beautiful and richest in the world. Silver undoubtedly exists ...
— Memoir of the Proposed Territory of Arizona • Sylvester Mowry
... obtain a closer view of some of the celestial bodies, we should probably find that they, too, teem with life, but with life specially adapted to the environment—life in forms strange and weird; life far stranger to us than Columbus found it to be in the New World when he first landed there. Life, it may be, stranger than ever Dante described or Dore sketched. Intelligence ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... page! It seems as if the greatest talents, the most elaborate knowledge, only sprang from the weakest and worst-regulated mind, as exotics from dung. The private records, the public works of men of letters, teem with an immitigable fury! Their histories might all be reduced into these sentences: they were born; they ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of many courses, assisted by an ingratiating little flask of Chianti, and, in that frame of mind which was with him almost chronic, had delayed a moment by the door, peering round in the dimly-lighted street in search of those mysterious incidents and persons with which the streets of London teem in every quarter and every hour. Villiers prided himself as a practised explorer of such obscure mazes and byways of London life, and in this unprofitable pursuit he displayed an assiduity which ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... thank-offering for the signal prosperity they had reaped. Cotton mills, and print works, were built by them of great extent, employing an immense number of hands; and they erected churches, founded schools, and gave a new life to the district. Their well-directed diligence made the valley teem with industry, activity, health, joy, and opulence; they never forgot the class from which they themselves had sprung, that of working-men, whose hands had mainly contributed to their aggrandizement, and, therefore, they ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... sway their woven curtains in the evening wind. A Dancing Hall, which formerly rang with the weird music accompanying the "woven paces and waving hands" of Court bedayas, in their spangled pink robes, now echoes to the tread of alien feet; the dim arcades teem with ghostly memories, and the mournful desolation of the Taman Sarie borrows fresh poignancy in the former scene of mirth and music. A moss-grown and slippery stairway leads to the green twilight of a subterranean grotto, ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... not stop talking until he had enumerated the entire list of the vices of the sex. The first Latin authors imitated the Greeks in their invectives against women; the comedies of Plautus, especially, teem with virulent attacks ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... hours, awake, With visions sometimes teem, Which to the slumbering brain would take The ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... will think it the greatest condescension to take your picture, and will paint you such as you never would wish to be seen or known. There is a predilection now for schools of design; and the world will teem with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... read, I hope, if e'er their hearts for love have bled, Not only pardon, but perhaps a tear. But now I clearly see that of mankind Long time I was the tale: whence bitter thought And self-reproach with frequent blushes teem; While of my frenzy, shame the fruit I find, And sad repentance, and the proof, dear-bought, That the world's joy ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... people of other nations, inhabitants of regions acquired not by conquest, but by compact, have been united with us in the participation of our rights and duties, of our burdens and blessings. The forest has fallen by the ax of our woodsmen; the soil has been made to teem by the tillage of our farmers; our commerce has whitened every ocean. The dominion of man over physical nature has been extended by the invention of our artists. Liberty and law have marched hand in hand. All ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... upon grief was my lot: Soon after, my lambkin was slain; My hare, having strayed from its cot, Was chased by the hounds o'er the plain. What countless calamities teem From memory's page on my view!— How trifling soever you seem, Yet once I ...
— Cottage Poems • Patrick Bronte
... Now the ruddy clusters teem, In osier baskets borne along By all the festal vintage throng Of rosy youths and virgins fair, Ripe as the melting fruits they bear. Now, now they press the pregnant grapes, And now the captive stream escapes, In fervid tide ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... distanse was seen an advancing teem, and mounted on its box driving was W. Alexander, distinguished as to aperence, tallent, and that charm, money. He was of the most patricien aristocrats of the place. Placed on the summit of one of those hils that spring up in the most unexpected ways and degrees ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... had tucked my head under the bedclothes'. 'This', she adds, 'I have always considered my chef d'oeuvre, as I don't believe I have ever succeeded in frightening anyone ever since'. At eighteen she gave herself up seriously, or rather, gaily, to literary work. All her books teem with wit and humor. One of her last creations, the delightful old butler, Murphy, in A Born Coquette, is equal to anything ever written by her compatriot, Charles Lever. Not that she has devoted herself entirely to mirth-moving situations. The ...
— Mrs. Hungerford - Notable Women Authors of the Day • Helen C. Black
... towers, and not feel as if he were surrounded by so many monuments of long-enduring glory? It is, when viewed in this light, that planted groves, and stately avenues, and cultivated parks, have an advantage over the more luxuriant beauties of unassisted nature. It is that they teem with moral associations, and keep up the ever-interesting story of ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... In a word, he describes not to the eye alone, but to the other senses, and to the whole man. He puts his heart into his subject, writes as he feels, and humanises whatever he touches. He makes all his descriptions teem with life and vivifying soul. His faults were those of his style—of the author and the man; but the original genius of the poet, the pith and marrow of his imagination, the fine natural mould in which his feelings ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... perfection. Its mechanical work is most exquisite, and reaches the whole effect of picture surprisingly. If the publishing public knew as well what to engrave as our engravers know how to engrave, we should not see our printsellers' windows teem with worthless works beautifully executed. We often wonder, as we stop occasionally to look at the display, where the purchasers are found for things that pain the eye and weary the mind to see—history, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... and occasions. The excessive wickedness of these outcasts may perhaps be attributed to their having abandoned their wandering life and become inmates of the towns, where to the original bad traits of their character they have super-added the evil and vicious habits of the rabble. Their mouths teem with abomination, and in no part of the world have I heard such frequent, frightful, and extraordinary cursing ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... The child, the female, meanness, deformity, were by him indiscriminately stamped with grandeur. A beggar rose from his hand the patriarch of poverty; the hump of his dwarf is impressed with dignity; his women are moulds of generation, his infants teem with man; his men are a race of giants. This is the 'terribile via' hinted at by Agostino Caracci; though, perhaps, as little understood by the Bolognese as by the blindest of his Tuscan adorers, with Vasari at their head. To give the appearance of perfect ease to the most perplexing difficulty, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... that crowd the novel (as, in truth, they teem throughout the great romances) testify to his range and grasp: the Dean family, naturally, in the center. The pious, sturdy Cameronian father and the two clearly contrasted sisters: Butler, the clergyman lover; the saddle-maker, ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... hillsides teem, The troop-ships bring us one by one, At vast expense of time and steam, To slay ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... *feats. And have achieved all their quests,* *enterprises; desires As well of Love, as other thing; All* was us never brooch, nor ring, *although Nor elles aught from women sent, Nor ones in their hearte meant To make us only friendly cheer, But mighte *teem us upon bier;* *might lay us on our bier Yet let us to the people seem (by their adverse demeanour)* Such as the world may of us deem,* *judge That women loven us for wood.* *madly It shall us do as muche good, ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... round the sun to meet the moon in France, that is to say, one should ever circumambulate, never make straight for the lodestar ahead. The way to almost any place of renown, natural, historic or artistic, is sure to teem with as much interest as that to which we are bound. So rich a palimpsest is French civilization, so varied is French scenery, so multifarious the points of view called up at every town, that hurry and scurry leave us hardly better informed than when we set ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... quantity of agricultural labour as is employed in France, were here bestowed upon an area equal to the French territory, the quantity of produce would fully equal that of France. Timber, coal, iron, and other useful minerals, abound; the harbours and rivers teem with fish; cattle of all sorts thrive and multiply with astonishing rapidity; every fruit that flourishes in Spain and Italy comes to the highest perfection; and Nature fully performs her part in bestowing ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 401, November 28, 1829 • Various
... question'd of the truth, at Troy." "If I spake false, thou falsely stamp'dst the coin," Said Sinon; "I am here but for one fault, And thou for more than any imp beside." "Remember," he replied, "O perjur'd one, The horse remember, that did teem with death, And all the world be witness to thy guilt." "To thine," return'd the Greek, "witness the thirst Whence thy tongue cracks, witness the fluid mound, Rear'd by thy belly up before thine eyes, A mass corrupt." To whom the coiner thus: "Thy mouth gapes wide as ever to let pass Its ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante |
