"Thunderstorm" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... little, and was clever enough to startle himself. It was a new delight and stimulus to Helen to perceive it, and she was soon swept away in much the same kind of nervous delight as her phantasy with the thunderstorm. The sofa upon which the two were seated had been somewhat apart from the rest, and so they had nothing to disturb them. A short half hour fled by, during which Helen's daring animation ruled everything, and at the end of which ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... During a heavy thunderstorm on the 12th, a Dutch East Indiaman, about two cables away from the Endeavour, had mainmast "split all to shivers." The Endeavour ...
— The Life of Captain James Cook • Arthur Kitson
... for a thousand pound. Hey! fancy turning her out such a night as this without sixpence in her pocket. Why, a man like you, that all the county knows, a man who has got two gold medals for bravery, ain't surely afraid of a thunderstorm?" ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... A thunderstorm turned its lashing rain upon their unprotected forms, drenched them utterly and damped their spirits. A sense of some indefinable presentiment of future dimmer crept over the mind, that subtle consciousness of approaching death forced its black ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... directions, was improvising increased hospital accommodation. The noise of mallet and hammer echoed in the soldiers' berth ominously; the workmen might have been making coffins. The prison was strangely silent, with the lowering silence which precedes a thunderstorm; and the convicts on deck no longer told stories, nor laughed at obscene jests, but sat together, moodily patient, as if waiting for something. Three men—two prisoners and a soldier—had succumbed since Rufus Dawes had been ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... cement and beautifully-moulded brickwork in its roof. This fine old ruin has not only suffered from the ravages of time, but the elements have also played havoc with it. On March 29, 1904, at 2.30 p.m., in a violent thunderstorm, it was struck by lightning. The “bolt” fell on the north-east corner tower, hurling to the ground, inside and outside, massive fragments of the battlemented parapet. The electric fluid then passed downward, through the building, emerging by a window of the third storey, ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... with machine-made fantasias on faded Italian operas—not, however, faded in his time. He devilled these as does the culinary artist the crab of commerce. He peppered and salted them and then giving for a background a real New Jersey thunderstorm, the concoction was served hot and smoking. Is it any wonder that as Mendelssohn relates, the Liszt audience always stood on the seats to watch him dance through the Lucia fantasia? Now every school girl jigs this fatuous stuff before she ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... the mowers come back, thoroughly tired and exhausted with their debauch, and go on feebly to work. There is hope again. But our climate is notoriously changeable. A fortnight of warm, close heat is pretty sure to breed a thunderstorm. Accordingly, just as the scythes begin to lay the tall grass prostrate again, there is a growl in the sky, and down comes the rain. A thunderstorm unsettles the weather, and here is perhaps another week lost. The farmer dares not discharge his haymakers, because he does not know but ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... centuries before the Christian era, and was appealed to under the names of "Our Lady," "Queen of Heaven," "Star of Heaven," "Star of the Sea," "Mother of God," and so forth. Hercules, Bacchus, and Perseus were gods born by mortal mothers. Zeus, father of the gods, visited Semele in the form of a thunderstorm and she gave birth, on the 25th of December, to the ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... the great house, didn't she?" "Nothing of the sort; it's a shame to take the girl's character away. She was caught in a thunder-storm close by; he was obliged to give her shelter; and she's never been near the place since. Miss Gwilt's been there, if you like, with no thunderstorm to force her in; and Miss Gwilt's off with him to London in a carriage all to themselves, eh, Mr. Mack?" "Ah, he's a soft one, that Armadale! with all his money, to take up with a red-haired woman, a good ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... through the streets; the wheels rolled with a dull, thundering noise over the uneven pavement; and this noise resounded in the ears and hearts of the pale and terrified spectators like the premonitory signs of some new thunderstorm. ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... say there was a short thunderstorm in the very midst of the dinner. Knowles and Mr. Howth, in their anxiety to keep off from ancient subjects of dispute, came, for a wonder, on modern politics, and of course there was a terrible collision, which made Mrs. Howth quite breathless: it was over in a minute, however, and it was ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... attack home, the Chinese soldiers, some 10,000 in number, contented themselves with waving their banners and uttering yells of defiance. The British artillery opened on them, and a running fight ensued. In the midst of it a violent thunderstorm burst over Canton. A detachment of Madras Sepoys lost its way, and was all but overwhelmed by the Chinese. They had to be extricated by a rescue party of marines, armed with the new percussion gun, which was proof against wet weather. Under threat of immediate bombardment, the payment ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... corresponding with that which is for ever going on in their own little spheres. If we have a toothache, we look for a change of weather; our rheumatism is a sure sign that God has made his arrangements to give us a slapping rain; and, should the white bull or the brown heifer die, look out for hail, or thunderstorm, at least, as a forerunner of the event. Nothing less can possibly console or satisfy us for such a most unaccountable, not to say unnatural and unwarrantable, a dispensation. The poets have ministered largely to this vanity on the part of mankind. Shakspere is ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... waist. We were moving parallel to, and about 300 yards below, the crestline of the ridge. When we had gone another mile a spattering of "overs" began to fall around like the first heavy drops of a thunderstorm. So wrapped in cotton wool is a now-a-days Commander-in-Chief that this was the first musketry fire I could claim to have come under since the beginning of the war. To sit in a trench and hear flights of bullets flop ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... "one can never tell what little summer cloud of their hatching may turn into a thunderstorm roaring and rattling about one's ears. I am here to keep order and quiet. Despite me they make the place a hornets' nest. Far rather would I govern Scythians or savage Britons than these people who are never ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... Russian name, "Grozny," means, rather, "menacing, threatening," than "terrible," the customary translation, being derived from "groza," a thunderstorm. ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... same on the following day and the day after, the gale lasting until the close of the third; when it completed its course and died away as suddenly as it began, winding up with a grand thunderstorm, in which the lightning flashed and the thunder pealed through the heavens in a manner whose like, the Captain affirmed, he had never ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... Laurence's view of the matter. He then touched briefly and hastily upon the prominent events of the Revolution. The thunderstorm of war had now rolled southward, and did not again burst upon Massachusetts, where its first fury had been felt. But she contributed her full share. So the success of the contest. Wherever a battle was fought,—whether at Long Island, White Plains, Trenton, Princeton, Brandywine, ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... time. "When I was a kid," he said at last, "there came up a terrible thunderstorm. It was in South America. I was water boy for a railroad gang, and the storm drove us in a shack. While lightnin' was hittin' all around, one of the grown men told me it always picked out boys with red ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... contrasted with the quiet mountains of snow, all these together produced a scene no one could have imagined. Neither plant nor bird, excepting a few condors wheeling around the higher pinnacles, distracted my attention from the inanimate mass. I felt glad that I was alone: it was like watching a thunderstorm, or hearing in full orchestra a chorus of ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... the long columns of men and all the traffic seemed to hesitate in the sluggish westward flow, and then it stopped, and then it began to go east. The weeks went on, and one day, very, very faintly, there was a rumbling like a distant thunderstorm. It was the guns! ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon
... same," she added, "I wish those clouds were not coming up. It has been so precious hot all day that I should not be the least surprised if we had a thunderstorm." ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade
... like to see a woman who could have written that description of an August evening before a thunderstorm; every wild-flower in the hedgerow exactly the flowers of August, every sign in the air exactly those of the month. Bless you! a woman would have filled the hedge with violets and cowslips. Nobody else but my friend Moss could have written ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Like a thunderstorm, these convulsions clear the atmosphere and give relief to the strained tension of the soul. At length, when his emotion had spent itself in long-drawn sighs, David rose in a calm and tender frame of mind, plucked a bunch of violets from the ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... a cruciform structure having two equal aisles of its whole length, with a fine pinnacled tower and sancte-bell turret in the south transept gable. The tower has been recently rebuilt, having been shattered in a thunderstorm in January, 1904, when the clock face was torn out and thrown out into the churchyard. It contains monuments to the Worsley family and the tomb of Sir John Leigh; also a fine painting, of the school of Rubens, of Daniel in ...
— Pictures in Colour of the Isle of Wight • Various
... arrived when the stillness becomes profound, like the calm which precedes the first burst of a thunderstorm. The vultures above, the horses and men below, are ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... in July, and henceforth, till late September, rain descended almost every day. The shower that had revealed the whereabouts of the hare was the first sign of the change. On the following night, a thunderstorm broke over the countryside, washed down the soil from the pastures, and sent the river roaring in flood through the gorge. While on the far side of the island the main torrent raged past beneath the willows, the divided stream under the ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... in which compressed cold air was allowed to rush into a copper vessel containing warm moist air, thus generating a large amount of electricity. He concludes that the rise of a column of warm moist air into the colder atmosphere above will be followed by a thunderstorm if it acquires sufficient velocity to prevent neutralization of the electricity generated by the friction of the air. Hence, in his opinion, open districts denuded of forests are more liable to thunderstorms than wooded regions, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 483, April 4, 1885 • Various
... Shelley left his wife at the Bagni di Lucca, and paid a visit to Lord Byron at Venice. He arrived at midnight in a thunderstorm. "Julian and Maddalo" was the literary fruit of this excursion—a poem which has rightly been characterized by Mr. Rossetti as the most perfect specimen in our language of the "poetical treatment of ordinary ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... conditions, and she had gone upstairs after lunch to her room, on the plea, a fairly true one, of thunder-headache. Aunt Jeannie had been eager with sympathy, smelling-salts, and offers to read, but Daisy had quietly rejected all these, saying that it was merely a question of thunderstorm. When the storm broke she would be better; till then smelling-salts ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... of his gods I set it up. In 157 my 29th year (my) army (and) camp I urged, I sent. To the country of Cirkhi[1] I ascended. Their cities I threw down, 158 dug up, (and) burned with fire. Their country like a thunderstorm I swept. Exceeding 159 fear over them I cast. In my 30th year when in the city of Calah I was stopping, Dayan-Assur 160 the Tartan, the Commander of the wide-spreading army at the head of my army I urged, I sent. The river Zab 161 ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... 1916, however, there were some not sorry to quit an area, which in winter became one of the wettest and most dismal in France. The Somme battle, which for three months had rumbled in the distance like a huge thunderstorm, was a magnet to attract all divisions in turn. The predictions of the French billet-keepers were realised at the end of October, when the 2/4th Oxfords were relieved in the trenches by a battalion ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... later in starting away than we should have been, and so when we were among the wilder folds of the hills, where the bare summits rise from wooded slopes and combes, we were overtaken by a heavy thunderstorm that came up swiftly from the west behind us, darkening the last sunset light with black clouds through which ...
— King Alfred's Viking - A Story of the First English Fleet • Charles W. Whistler
... which is perceived every night toward the seaside as well as in the inland parts, at Merida for example, where M. Palacios observed it during two years? The distance, greater than 40 leagues, at which the light is observed, has led to the supposition that it might be owing to the effects of a thunderstorm, or of electrical explosions which might daily take place in a pass in the mountains. It is asserted that, on approaching the farol, the rolling of thunder is heard. Others vaguely allege that it is an air-volcano, and that asphaltic soils, like those of Mena, cause these inflammable ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... stirred the curtains of apricot velvet. The brass band in Washington Square was playing selections from Verdi; the long-drawn wails of the horns crept in through the windows like snatches of a dirge. She was reduced to speaking of the sultry air. A thunderstorm was brewing? ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... average, though intervals of twenty or thirty minutes may occur without any considerable fall, then three or four immense discharges will take place in as many minutes. The sound they make is like heavy thunder, with a prolonged roar after deep thudding sounds—a perpetual thunderstorm easily heard three or four miles away. The roar in our tent and the shaking of the ground one or two miles distant from points of ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... drinking. But first they lifted the neck of corn, dressed with ribbons gaily, and set it upon the mantelpiece, each man with his horn a-froth; and then they sang a song about it, every one shouting in the chorus louder than harvest thunderstorm. Some were in the middle of one verse, and some at the end of the next one; yet somehow all managed to get together in the mighty roar of the burden. And if any farmer up the country would like to know Exmoor harvest-song as sung in my time and will be sung ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... it, signori? Just visa my papers, and we'll get along. It looks as though we're to have a bad thunderstorm, and, if so, we shall catch it up on the ...
— Mademoiselle of Monte Carlo • William Le Queux
... sense of relief from responsibility and care. About 3 o'clock in the afternoon, while engaged in reading, I was informed by my wife that an unusual rumbling and loud noise could be heard in the west. I remarked that it must be a thunderstorm and nothing more. The loud roar, however, continued, and became clearer and more distinct. I arose hastily, took a position and listened to the sound. In a few moments my mother-in-law, who resides with us, called to me in a loud voice to ...
— A Full Description of the Great Tornado in Chester County, Pa. • Richard Darlington
... stood, the forest slid away in a sheet of blue-green for mile upon mile; below the forest was a village in its sprinkle of terraced fields and steep grazing-grounds. Below the village they knew, though a thunderstorm worried and growled there for the moment, a pitch of twelve or fifteen hundred feet gave to the moist valley where the streams gather that are the ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... of the 42d Illinois. The sailors were all armed; hand-grenades were placed within reach, and hoses were attached to the boilers for throwing scalding water to drive off boarding parties. Thus prepared, the Carondelet, on the night of April 4th, "in the black shadow of a thunderstorm," safely passed the island and batteries. It was fired on, but reached New Madrid without the loss of a man. The Pittsburg, under Lieutenant-Commander Thompson, in like manner ran the gauntlet without injury, also in a thunderstorm, April 7th. ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... dark so suddenly that Alice thought there must be a thunderstorm coming on. 'What a thick black cloud that is!' she said. 'And how fast it comes! Why, I do believe it's ...
— Through the Looking-Glass • Charles Dodgson, AKA Lewis Carroll
... philosophy of the unbelieving Theseus, with the candour of Hippolyta, lifts the whole into relation with the realities of human life. Or take, as another instance, the pretended madman Edgar, the court-fool, and the rugged old king going grandly mad, sheltered in one hut, and lapped in the roar of a thunderstorm. ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... had been threatening. But, though keen eyes were watching the scudding clouds, no apprehension was felt, as it was believed to be but a passing thunderstorm that ...
— The Circus Boys on the Flying Rings • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... catastrophes. But the earthquake, though it alarm our body, will bring no fear to our mind unless we regard it as an act of justice, of mysterious vengeance, of supernatural punishment. And so it is, too, with the thunderstorm, with illness, with death, with the myriad phenomena and accidents of life. It would seem as though the true alarm of our soul, the great fear which stirs other instincts within us than that of mere self-preservation, is only called forth by the thought of a more or less determinate God, ...
— The Buried Temple • Maurice Maeterlinck
... am very feeble, but have taken my pen to acknowledge the goodness of God to me for so long a period. At noon we had an awful thunderstorm, during which my soul was calm and peaceful. This is the Lord's doing. I felt sweet trust and confidence in my Almighty Saviour. Afterwards I received my ticket at the hands of the Rev. Thos. Nightingale. On the ticket there ...
— Religion in Earnest - A Memorial of Mrs. Mary Lyth, of York • John Lyth
... dukes, if he will only outvie them in tranquility. An imperturbable demeanour comes from perfect patience. Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... passing in the St. Nicholas Hotel, the streets were comparatively quiet. It had been a hard day for the rioters, as well as for the police, and they were glad of a little rest. Besides, they had become more or less scattered by a terrific thunderstorm that broke over the city, deluging the streets with water. In the midst of it, there came a telegraphic dispatch to the commissioners, calling for assistance. The tired police were stretched around on the floor or boxes, seeking a little rest, when they were aroused, and summoned to fall in; and ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... "We don't have a thunderstorm every day—at least not at home," corrected Zaidie, "but on Jupiter they must have two or three eclipses every day. Meanwhile, there goes Jupiter himself. What a difference distance makes! This little thing is ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith
... the bitterness of despair. For days thereafter we heard nothing, though the hot, close Summer air seemed surcharged with the premonitions of a war storm about to burst, even as nature heralds in the same way a concentration of the mighty force of the elements for the grand crash of the thunderstorm. We waited in tense expectancy for the decision of the fates whether final victory or defeat should end ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... REAL hot day, and threatened an earthquake and a thunderstorm; but nothing has come of it beyond sheet lightning to- night, which is splendid over the bay, and looks as if repeated in a grand bush-fire on the hills opposite. The sunset was glorious. That rarest of insects, ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon
... A tremendous thunderstorm actually broke over the Cathedral as the murderers were ...
— Becket and other plays • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... wet and evaporation is active, capillary attraction tends to unite earth and clouds, and rain results. We all know that hill-tops receive showers which frequently pass over the vales without falling, probably because of the greater proximity of the hills. In a long drought a violent thunderstorm, which soaks the ground, will often be followed by a complete change of weather, as the result of contact established between the ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... should be no more allowed than in constant musical notes. When this idea strikes, as it must have, many artists, reason, consideration, instinct, and all, refer at once to the solar spectrum as such an one. The analogy between this scale, which governs the chromatics of the sunset and thunderstorm, and that which the science of man has established, empirically, for harmonies, is remarkable, and we shall try to make it patent. They are both scales of seven: the tonic, mediant, and dominant, find their types in red, yellow, and blue, while the ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... then that something occurred which (for everything so far has been sheer prologue) led to these remarks. I was passing the crowd about one of the gentlemen—the more brazenly confident one—who deny the existence of a beneficent Creator, when the words, "Looking like a dying duck in a thunderstorm," clanged out, followed by a roar of delighted laughter; and in a flash I remembered precisely where I was when, forty and more years ago, I first heard from a nursemaid that ancient simile and was so struck by ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... that was a bad guess: I'm sure Lindley's just the same steady-going, sober, plodding old horse he was as a boy. His picture doesn't fit a romantic frame—singing under a lady's window in a thunderstorm! Your serenader ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... Matthew, and of his fine record at college, and of his gentle nature. The early afternoon was hot; they walked slowly; they loitered when they came to shade. Then out of the west came booming black clouds, and they were caught in a mid-summer thunderstorm. He helped her as they ran for shelter, but, almost blinded by the pelting rain, she tripped and fell awkwardly, twisting her ankle cruelly. She probably fainted. Matthew was frightened, and in his helplessness lost his head. She was roused ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... as a matter of fact, the world-wide dissemination of the legend is most remarkable. Zeus, Father of the gods, visited Semele, it will be remembered, in the form of a thunderstorm; and she gave birth to the great saviour and deliverer Dionysus. Zeus, again, impregnated Danae in a shower of gold; and the child was Perseus, who slew the Gorgons (the powers of darkness) and saved Andromeda (the human soul ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... before the ball game, a May thunderstorm swept the Walnut Valley and the darkness fell early. As Dennie Saxon waited on the Sunrise portico before starting out in the rain, Professor Burgess locked the front door and joined her. Victor Burleigh was also ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter
... Unmindfulness, whose water no vessel can hold; of this they were all obliged to drink a certain quantity, and those who were not saved by wisdom drank more than was necessary; and each one as he drank forgot all things. Now after they had gone to rest, about the middle of the night there was a thunderstorm and earthquake, and then in an instant they were driven upwards in all manner of ways to their birth, like stars shooting. He himself was hindered from drinking the water. But in what manner or by what means ...
— The Republic • Plato
... 'I don't hold much with evening primroses, sir; but I was out and about at four; there was no thunderstorm.' ...
— Echoes of the War • J. M. Barrie
... gullies, a new species of Dodonaea, with pinnate pubescent leaves, was frequent. Towards evening we had a thunderstorm from the westward. ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... tremendous thunderstorm broke over us, and a nasty blue, zigzagging streak of lightning struck our mizzen-royal mast, splintering the spar and sending the tye-block down on the poop, nearly ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... stages. These three stages he called the theological, metaphysical and positive. In the first stage history shows that man explained the origin of everything by explicit reference to wills like his own, though, of course, invisible; and ultimately, by an appeal to one supreme Will. Thus, a thunderstorm, the rise and setting of the sun, the ebb and flow of tides, the succession of seasons and crops are all explained by the agency of unseen wills, powers, or divinities. As time advances, progress is so far made that all minor deities are merged in the belief in one supreme Being who created the ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... followed a little footpath winding in and out of the rocks that built up the plateau on the hillside whereon the house stood. Presently this led them through the orchard; then came a bare strip of veldt, a very dangerous spot in a thunderstorm, but a great safeguard to the stead and trees round it, for the ironstone cropped up here, and from the house one might often see flash after flash striking down on to it, and even running and zigzagging about its surface. To the left of this ironstone were some cultivated lands, and in ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... everything disappeared in a burst of smoke, which spread itself in the air like a huge duster made from turkey feathers. There came another shriek, a little nearer, and the ground rose in a huge black mushroom, which boiled and writhed like the clouds of an advancing thunderstorm. Boom! Boom! Two vast, all-pervading roars came to Jimmie's ears; and his knees began to quake. By heck! He was under fire! He looked ahead; there must be Germans just up there! Was a fellow supposed ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... hours to rest and enjoy the mosquitoes, but about midnight we went on again, taking advantage of the comparative cool of the night. At dawn we rested for three hours, and then started once more, and laboured on till about ten o'clock, when a thunderstorm, accompanied by a deluge of rain, overtook us, and we spent the next six hours ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... in the morning, and it was more or less cloudy during the day. We watched a fierce thunderstorm, which came round the south side of Imbros, up its east side, then it turned west towards Samothrace. Much shelling to-day, but mostly short and some way from our camp. ...
— The Incomparable 29th and the "River Clyde" • George Davidson
... Ravenna without effect, quarreled with Attalus, and deposed him, and for the third time marched upon Rome. Slaves within the city opened the Salarian gate to their countrymen, and on the 24th of August, 410, the sack of the city began. To add to the horrors of the scene, a terrific thunderstorm was raging. For three days Rome was given up to pillage. Only the Christian temples were respected, which were crowded by those who sought within them an asylum. Rome had been the center of Paganism. The ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... get a good thunderstorm You'll see how long the strike'll last, and what Sir Edward Carson has to say to ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... went to the well. I found nobody there. The day grew hot. White, shaggy cloudlets were flitting rapidly from the snow-clad mountains, giving promise of a thunderstorm; the summit of Mount Mashuk was smoking like a just extinguished torch; grey wisps of cloud were coiling and creeping like snakes around it, arrested in their rapid sweep and, as it were, hooked to its prickly brushwood. The atmosphere was charged with electricity. I plunged into the avenue of ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... Wilson; he had his arm round her waist, and her head was on his shoulder. She said, 'I WILL trust you, Jack—I know you'll give up the drink for my sake. And I'll help you, and we'll be so happy!' or words in that direction. A thunderstorm was coming on. The sky had darkened up with a great blue-black storm-cloud rushing over, and they hadn't noticed it. I didn't mind, and the fish bit best in a storm. But just as she said 'happy' came a blinding flash ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... past we had had signs that the hot weather was not going to continue and we had frequent showers of rain. One afternoon clouds began to gather from the south, and just as it was beginning to get dark we realised we were in for a pretty severe thunderstorm. With thunder we knew to expect rain and made hurried preparations, but no preparations we possibly could have made would have saved us from the deluge that came that evening. It rained steadily, in a way ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... enterprise, both normal and abnormal, which exists.'—It appears that the galvanic communications, external to the Observatory, had been in a bad state, the four wires to London Bridge having probably been injured by a thunderstorm in the last autumn, and the Report states that 'The state of the wires has not enabled us to drop the Ball at Deal. The feeble current which arrives there has been used for some months merely as giving a signal, by which an attendant is guided in dropping ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... youthful atheism had been a matter for secret consternation in White. White did not believe very much in God even then, but this positive disbelieving frightened him. It was going too far. There had been a terrible moment in the dormitory, during a thunderstorm, a thunderstorm so vehement that it had awakened them all, when Latham, the humourist and a quietly devout boy, had suddenly challenged Benham to ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... of the fork and fling it on to the cart as if it were a feather. Lawyer Wilson always took a hand himself if signs of rain appeared, and Mark occasionally visited the scene of action when a crowd in the field made a general jollification, or when there was an impending thunderstorm. In such cases even women and girls joined the workers and all hands bent together to the task of getting a load into the barn ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... carrying-power of a mountain torrent can scarcely be realized by those who have not observed it for themselves. I have seen a little mountain-stream swell in the course of a heavy thunderstorm to such a torrent, brown and turbid with earth torn from the mountainside, and sweeping resistlessly along in its career a shower of stones and rock-fragments. That which happens thus occasionally with many streams ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... hungry to notice the shot, or had mistaken the sound for thunder. Later on the moon rose, and at half-past three in the morning a third shot took effect, for the animal went off badly wounded. Some time before that a heavy thunderstorm had come on, but, sheltered beneath our rugs, we did not get really wet. We now slept, feeling our work was done. At sunrise the native hunter and I got down and ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... an hour after we left Appatinna this morning we had a very heavy shower of rain, and, although it only lasted about a quarter of an hour, it literally flooded the whole country, making it boggy. It was the heaviest thunderstorm I have ever seen. We shall have no difficulty in procuring water now all the way to the telegraph line, which is not more than forty miles from here. The natives stayed at Appatinna, as they had too much emu to leave. We did not want them, and were just as well pleased they did not ...
— Explorations in Australia • John Forrest
... for the present, and she had yielded to the warm current of life and hope which was bearing her back into the sunshine. Suddenly the elderly woman who had formed one of the company in the summer-house on the day of the thunderstorm passed along the walk with her trowel and watering-pot. She nodded to Miss Pinckney, and then, pausing opposite the pair, glanced sharply from one to the other, smiled significantly and passed on. This trifling ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... and myself have just returned from an exhibition on the Saone in my boat, which turned out delightful. We had considerable variety of wind and weather, including a very grand thunderstorm with tremendous wind (of short duration). We were just near enough to a port where there was an inn to be able to take refuge in time. The boat would have ridden out the storm on the water, scudding ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... the navigation subjected them and wished to go by land Capt. C. engouraged them and passifyed them. one of the canoes was very near overseting in a rapid today. they proceeded but slowly. at noon they had a thunderstorm which continued about half an hour. their hunters killed 3 deer and a fawn. they encamped in a smoth plain near a few cottonwood trees ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... have been ill these eight days with a tertian fever, caught in the country on horseback in a thunderstorm. Yesterday I had the fourth attack: the two last were very smart, the first day as well as the last being preceded by vomiting. It is the fever of the place and the season. I feel weakened, but not unwell, in the intervals, except ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... row, one of those rows which turn a school upside down like a volcanic eruption and provide old boys with something to talk about, when they meet, for years, is not unlike the beginning of a thunderstorm. ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... terror lest it might be the prince of darkness himself coming, with all his demons. What frightened them most were the shrieks and moans that could be heard above the other noises. There were wails and groans, laughter and bellowings, whines and hisses. When that which they had supposed was a big thunderstorm was right upon them, it seemed to be a mingling of groans and curses, of sobs and angry cries, of the blast of horns, of crackling fire, of the plaints of doomed spirits, of the mocking laughter of demons, of the ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... by the sinister racket of the jazz, which made a noise like a barrage of 4.2 howitzers in a thunderstorm. ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... country. Tell the Prince to hurry up reinforcements." I lunched in the schoolhouse of Aluga, and pushed on for Bukowitza and Shawnik, where the invasion would be stopped with certainty. Half way to Bukowitza there burst on us a terrific thunderstorm, with torrents of rain. One bolt struck so near us that the concussion knocked my perianik down, and my horse jumped up on all fours as I never saw a horse do before, but neither was touched by the lightning, and we arrived at the first ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... cloudy; a heavy thunderstorm during the night had cooled the air, and the whole plain was glistening with bright drops; the peacocks were shrieking from the tree-tops and spreading their gaudy plumage to the cool breeze; and the whole face of nature seemed refreshed. We felt the same invigorating spirit, and we took ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... remember that just about this time last week we were crouching in a hole in a muddy bank waiting for the thunderstorm to pass on? How different now, though we are still in Ceylon and, as crow flies, not so many miles from the Hunters' mountain-side. It is a gorgeous tropical afternoon, the bits of sky we can see through the feathery-leaved trees are of the deepest blue, ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... bowlful of water upon the slab, and immediately there came the thunder, and after the thunder the shower. And such a thunderstorm they had never known before, and many of the attendants who were in Arthur's train were killed by the shower. After the shower had ceased the sky became clear; and on looking at the tree they beheld it completely leafless. ...
— The Mabinogion • Lady Charlotte Guest
... His brethren found fault with Domenico's red cope and bade him change it. They consulted, and came at last to the conclusion that their own champion had found himself unable to meet martyrdom. At length it was announced that there would be no ordeal—a thunderstorm had not caused one spectator to leave his place in the Piazza, where there should be wrought a miracle. It was clear that the Prior's enemies had sought his death, for they showed a furious passion of resentment. Even the Piagnoni ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... conceive that she had been pretty once, but that was many years ago. She was now withered and fallen-looking. Her hair was thin and straggling, her dress poor and scanty. Her moods changed as rapidly as a weathercock before a thunderstorm. One moment she said her "mutch" was the only thing that gave her comfort, and the next she slackened the strings and let it back upon her neck, in a passion at it for making her too hot. Her talk ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... but how is the assertion, that it is so, to be tested? If it be said that the event exceeds the power of natural causes, what can justify such a saying? The day-fly has better grounds for calling a thunderstorm supernatural, than has man, with his experience of an infinitesimal fraction of duration, to say that the most astonishing event that can be imagined is beyond the scope of ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... when I began my walk, and before I arrived at its end, the clouds rising from all quarters of the horizon, and especially gathering around the peaks of the mountain, betokened the near approach of a thunderstorm. This was a great delight to me. Gladly would I take leave of my home with the memory of a last night of tumultuous magnificence; followed, probably, by a day of weeping rain, well suited to the mood of my own heart in bidding farewell to the ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... formulas which I always observe, be the fun fast or slow. I can best explain this by recalling one particular evening on the Mandal river. It was the one occasion when I deemed it necessary to take out a mackintosh. With the exception of a thunderstorm in the early part of July, the downpour as to which was during the night, the days had been of strong and unbroken sunshine; but in the middle of the month there came a close, cloudy day when the flies were exceedingly troublesome, and the only mosquitoes that were ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... the gate he encountered the old Lord of Falkenstein and his daughter, who had been apprised of the miracle that had happened and had come out to view the new roadway. The knight of Sayn related his adventure with the earth-spirit, upon which the Lord of Falkenstein told him how a terrible thunderstorm mingled with unearthly noises had raged throughout the night. Terrified, he and his daughter had spent the hours of darkness in prayer, until with the approach of dawn some of the servitors had plucked up courage and ventured ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... up. "A summer thunderstorm is coming," he said, "and from the look of things it's going to be pretty black. Then's when we ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... half a mile, when every bundle was put down and a halt called, and again we had to listen to the unintelligible story of the wild animal or animals that would destroy us. We sat down and tried to get them to see as we did, that a house was necessary for our comfort. A thunderstorm was working up, and soon the rain would be down on us—let us be off for the village. They had a long confab with those in the village on the ridge, which, when ended, seemed favourable; and so up the steep side of the ridge we went. When halfway up they ...
— Adventures in New Guinea • James Chalmers
... moment towards sundown when the light, about to be withdrawn, glows with a fulness of gold which makes it seem impossible that it can ever die. The earth was heavy with fruition, every square field brimful of the ungathered harvest. The heavy corn swayed almost by reason of its own weight. A thunderstorm would beat it prostrate in an hour. All the crops were full and good, some almost level with the low hedges. Heat seemed to radiate from the yellow mass, that scorching heat which in autumn never seems to leave the earth, but ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... and proceeded to Prokonessus, ordering all small vessels which they met to be seized and detained in the interior of the fleet, in order that the enemy might not learn his movements. It happened also that a heavy thunderstorm with rain and darkness assisted his design, as he not only was unseen by the enemy, but was never suspected of any intention of attack by the Athenians themselves, who had given up any idea of going to sea when he ordered them on board. Little ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... Roman legion which overcame Marcomanni in 179 A.D., their extreme thirst having been relieved by a thunderstorm sent in answer to the prayers of Christian ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... variety of circumstances, and has been invested with a special sanctity and efficacy. It has been regarded as necessary before partaking of sacred food, before the performance of a sacred ceremony, after a death, in the presence of a great occurrence (as an eclipse or a thunderstorm, regarded as supernatural), as a part of the training of magicians, as a preparation for the search after a guardian spirit, as a part of ceremonies in honor of gods, as an act of abstinence in connection with a calamity ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... quoted which declared that a Roman emperor would never proceed victoriously beyond Ctesiphon, Carus was not convinced, but he fell sick, and his projects were delayed; he was still in his camp near Ctesiphon, when a terrible thunderstorm broke over the ground occupied by the Roman army. A weird darkness was spread around, amid which flash followed flash at brief intervals, and peal upon peal terrified the superstitious soldiery. Suddenly, ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... Pythagoras; we have simply utilized sources of power that their clumsy workmen allowed to escape. Of the four principal sources—food, fuel, wind, and tide—including harnessed waterfalls, the last two do by far the most work. Much of the electrical energy in every thunderstorm is also captured and condensed in our capacious storage batteries, as natural hygeia in the form of rain was and is still caught in our country cisterns. Every exposed place is crowned by a cluster of huge windmills that lift water to ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... had the larger force, but Edward the better position. Philip's army included a number of hired Genoese crossbowmen, on whom he placed great dependence; but a thunderstorm had wet their bowstrings, which rendered them nearly useless, and, as they advanced toward the English, the afternoon sun shone so brightly in their eyes that they could not take accurate aim. The English ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... I know of," said Gervase. "Love must be wild and uncontrolled to save it from banalite. It must be a summer thunderstorm; the heavy brooding of the clouds of thought, the lightning of desire, then the crash, the downpour,—and the end, in which the bland sun smiles upon a bland world of dull but wholesome routine and tame conventionality, making ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... had been a brief but violent thunderstorm, with a tropical downpour of rain, and now clouds were scudding across the blue of the sky. Through a temporary rift in the veiling the crescent of the moon looked down upon us. It had a greenish tint, and it set me thinking of the filmed, green ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... rival in supernatural powers. This irritated Indaba-zimbi beyond measure, and a quarrel ensued between the two witch-doctors that resulted in a challenge to trial by lightning being given and accepted. These were the conditions. The rivals must await the coming of a serious thunderstorm, no ordinary tempest would serve their turn. Then, carrying assegais in their hands, they must take their stand within fifty paces of each other upon a certain patch of ground where the big thunderbolts were observed to strike continually, and by the exercise of their occult powers ...
— Allan's Wife • H. Rider Haggard
... with a whirlwind of denial, and the altercation wages fast and furious, and poor, little, delicate Mrs. Simmons stands like a kitten in a thunderstorm in the midst of a ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... there were so few villages on the route, and only now and then a cheap shanty in sight; and crossing the divide to the waters of the James, at sundown, in the midst of a splendid effect of mountains and clouds in a thunderstorm, they came to Natural Bridge station, where a ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... been transplanted as usual, the chairs ranked in line, the grass edgings trimmed, the roads made to look as if they were suffering from a heavy thunderstorm; carriages had been called for by the easeful, horses by the brisk, and the Drive and Row were again the groove of gaiety for an hour. We gaze upon the spectacle, at six o'clock on this midsummer afternoon, in a melon-frame atmosphere and beneath a violet sky. The ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... Paula's bearing showed some sign of being disquieted at what she had done; but she covered her mood under a cloak of saucy serenity. Perhaps a tender remembrance of a certain thunderstorm in the foregoing August when she stood with Somerset in the arbour, and did not own that she loved him, was pressing on her memory and bewildering her. She had not seen quite clearly, in adopting De Stancy's suggestion, that Somerset would now have ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... of pity and surprise that he could have had his hand chopped off, so he told me afterwards, rather than vex her for a moment. So he shut up his mouth and ground his teeth together, for it was no joke in the way of pain, and the blood began to run like a blind creek after a thunderstorm. ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... very slough of multifarious knowledge, guided by an ardent imagination and childish reasoning, till an accident again changed the current of my ideas. When I was about fifteen years old we had retired to our house near Belrive, when we witnessed a most violent and terrible thunderstorm. It advanced from behind the mountains of Jura, and the thunder burst at once with frightful loudness from various quarters of the heavens. I remained, while the storm lasted, watching its progress with curiosity ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... at the University of Edinburgh, where his studies were as irregular as at the High School: at the latter he is said to have made his first attempt at versification in the description of a thunderstorm in six lines, the recital of which afforded his mother considerable pleasure and promise; and, on another occasion, he is stated to have remarked, during a journey over a sterile district of Scotland, in a day of drizzling rain, "It is only ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 571 - Volume 20, No. 571—Supplementary Number • Various
... suppose, in the mind of any intelligent man at the present day a doubt as to the electrical origin of a lightning flash. The questions to be considered are rather whence comes the electricity, and in what way is the thunderstorm brought about. In attempting to answer these questions, sight must not be lost of the fact that the very nature of electricity is in itself almost sufficient to baffle any effort put forth to ascertain from lightning, as such, its ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various
... our present high civilization. Perhaps the presence of so many electrical machines in the air and the utilization of so much electricity on land and water have, after thousands of years, done much toward freeing us from the thunderstorm, with its deadly lightning. We have fairly robbed the clouds of their electricity and taught it to ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... time they were well within sound of the big guns. The sound reminded him of a distant thunderstorm. It grew louder as the hours passed and the men neared the front. All understood what the sound meant. To Remi that distant roar was the sweetest ...
— The Children of France • Ruth Royce
... 12th that the end came. The fine weather, after lasting for six weeks, had broken up two days before into light thunderstorms, which did not clear the air as usual. Ky Jago (short for Caiaphas), across the way, prophesied a big thunderstorm to come, but allowed he might be mistaken when on the morning of the 12th the rain came down in sheets. This torrential rain lasted until two in the afternoon, when the sky cleared and a pleasant northwesterly draught played up the ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... me about bringing you over here in that thunderstorm, and how you quieted me when nobody ...
— Polly of the Hospital Staff • Emma C. Dowd
... could not take our eyes from him. He had become enigmatical and touching, in virtue of that mysterious cause that had driven him through the night and through the thunderstorm to the shelter of the schooner's cuddy. Not one of us doubted that we were looking at a fugitive, incredible as it appeared to us. He was haggard, as though he had not slept for weeks; he had become lean, as though he had not eaten ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... maniac mockery. Then, even as we sprang towards him, a grey circle surged round him, and together they came towards us. For a time we were hard set to beat them off. When our Winchesters were empty a ring of dead lay around us, and then the moon was blotted out and dense darkness fell as the thunderstorm burst over us. Between the peals of thunder we could hear the hoarse barks of the main troop getting farther and farther away, but to follow was impossible. We expected to find the mangled body of Hector in the morning. Daylight showed no trace of him, however, and though we spent months searching ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... tame and commonplace compared with my lightning-rods. Our street was blocked night and day with spectators, and among them were many who came from the country to see. It was a blessed relief on the second day when a thunderstorm came up and the lightning began to "go for" my house, as the historian Josephus quaintly phrases it. It cleared the galleries, so to speak. In five minutes there was not a spectator within half a mile of my place; but ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... monotonous as a book of sermons. I went round finding eatable things and generally thinking; but I tell you I was bored to death before the first day was out. It shows my luck—the very day I landed the weather changed. A thunderstorm went by to the north and flicked its wing over the island, and in the night there came a drencher and a howling wind slap over us. It wouldn't have taken much, you know, to ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... this terribly beautiful thing in the midst of utter emptiness. And I loved it with a strange, desperate, tigerish love. It expressed itself so magnificently; and that is really all a man, or a waterfall, or a mountain, or a flower, or a grasshopper, or a meadow lark, or an ocean, or a thunderstorm has to do in this world. And it was doing it right out in the middle of a desert, bleak, sun-leprosied, forbidding, with only the stars and the moon and the sun and a cliff-swallow or two to behold. Thundering ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... At last success came. I made them see and hear mosquitoes and fight the tormentors with great energy. At this point they became dazed, and it was easy to command their senses in other respects. At a suggestion they heard music, the noises of a riot, a thunderstorm, the roaring of lions, a speech by Col. Ingersoll, and they gradually came to see vividly anything to which I directed their attention. In this world of hallucination they lost consciousness—or, rather, they abandoned their real existence and ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, January 1888 - Volume 1, Number 12 • Various
... unfastened," Answered him the boatman Martin. "He may be my man," said Anton. "When I came down to the river, There I found my boat turned over On the shore—the rudder broken, And the fastening cut asunder. If a thunderstorm would only Sweep away these wicked people, Who like thieves at night are roving On the Rhine in borrowed vessels." "And the trumpet blow," said Anton.— "But whenever I shall find him, To the justice I shall take him. He must pay ...
— The Trumpeter of Saekkingen - A Song from the Upper Rhine. • Joseph Victor von Scheffel
... so painful to him that he wished to have it realised and over as soon as possible, and he looked at her again before rising from his seat. He could hardly believe that she was the same woman who had stood with him, watching the thunderstorm, on the previous afternoon. ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... been somewhere between three an' four. The moon had a big ring aroun' it. Out on the square there was a dam' cur behind the planks what got up an' howled. Then it began to drip an' soon a thunderstorm came up. ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... Natives approach the camp during the night. Scared by a rocket. Discovery of a Caper-tree. The kangaroos and emus driven away by the natives. Difference between the plains of the Darling and Bogan. Extreme illness of one of the party. New Year's range. A thunderstorm. Three natives remind us of the man wounded. Another man of the party taken ill. Acacia pendula. Beauty of the scenery. Mr. Larmer traces Duck Creek up to the Macquarie. A hot wind. Talambe of the Bogan ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... fretfulness, a mizzling, drizzling rain of discomforting remark; there is grumbling, a northeast storm that never clears; there is scolding, the thunderstorm with lightning and hail. All these are worse than useless; they are positive sins, by whomsoever indulged,—sins as great and real as many that are shuddered at in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... necessity, is as yet unborn, and the primitive thinker everywhere assumes the operation of personal beings as responsible for all that occurs. This is not so much the product of careful and elaborate philosophising, it is closer akin to the naive thinking of a child concerning a thunderstorm. Primitive thought accepts the universal operation of living and intelligent forces as an unquestionable fact. Modern thought tends more and more surely in the direction of regarding the universe as a complex of self-adjusting, non-conscious forces. Primitive thought assumes a ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... not reach Cordova until 7.30 p.m., and it was therefore too late for us to see much of the approach to the city, but to-morrow we intend to do a good deal in that way. In the middle of the night we were aroused by a violent thunderstorm. The lightning was most vivid, and illuminated our room with many colours. The rain fell heavily, flooding everything, and making the streets look like rivers, and the courtyard of the hotel like a lake. It is one of the oldest, and, at the same time, one of the most unhealthy, of the cities of ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... directed to seize Brynbella by a night attack. Beacon Hill was occupied without opposition, and the Naval gun, Field battery, and 2nd Queen's were detailed to hold it as a support to the attack; to these was subsequently added the 1st Border. A thunderstorm of great severity now delayed the advance upon Brynbella; the night was intensely dark; the rocky nature of the ground and the absence of beaten tracks made the task of assembling the troops and directing their movements extremely ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... The air was filled with wild yells and still wilder curses as the two foes grappled. It was war in all its savagery. Tomahawks and knives were used as freely as rifles. Stabbing, shooting, wrestling, the men fought each other more like wildcats than human beings. A fearful thunderstorm burst forth, too. Rain fell in torrents, a raging wind tore through the tree tops, thunder and lightning added their ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... to have been meeting all day. Began at three o'clock: Sitting suspended at half-past; resumed at 4.30; off again till nine; might have been continued indefinitely through night, only thunderstorm of unparalleled ferocity burst over Metropolis, and put an end to further manoeuvring. "Bless me!" tremulously murmured Lord SALISBURY's Black Man, as a peal of thunder shook Clock Tower, and lighted up House of Lords with lurid flame, "if these are home politics, wish I'd stayed ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 27, 1892 • Various
... he to himself, "he is very late. What can have kept him?" He glanced down the street, and saw the small crowd wending its way from the hostelry. "It was really a most dreadful storm, the most dreadful thunderstorm I ever remember." His eye marked where the light from the expansive windows of the Bank illumined the wet asphalt pavement. "Landslips frequently occur on newly made tracks, especially after heavy rain. ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... been recently settled with Le Grand,) the finest of the whole opera, there cannot fail to be such a noise and confusion in the theatre, that an aria, would make a very bad figure in this place, and moreover there is a thunderstorm which is not likely to subside during Raaff's aria! The effect, therefore, of a recitative between the choruses must be infinitely better. Lisel Wendling has also sung through her two arias half a dozen times, and is much pleased with them. I heard from a third person that ...
— The Letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V.1. • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
... Norfolk, and one afternoon, to escape a coming thunderstorm, I knocked at the door of a lonely cottage on the outskirts of a common. The woman, a kindly bustling person, asked me in; and hoping I would excuse her, as she was busy ironing, returned to her work in another room. I thought myself alone, and was standing ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... therefore is as far from being vulgar as the man who has never known what it was to be any thing but a gentleman. The faults, like the merits, of Dickens' work resulted from the exuberance and power of his imagination. The same vividness of conception which gives such life to his description of a thunderstorm or of a quiet family scene, sometimes betrayed him into exaggeration and caricature. And yet when we consider the number and variety of the figures conjured up by his creative mind, from Paul Dombey to the Jew, Fagin, it is extraordinary that to so few this criticism ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... found equal interest and delight in meetings with Sister Mena, especially after a thunderstorm had driven the two to take refuge at what the Sisters called "the cell of St. Kenelm," and tea had unfolded their young simple hearts to one another! Magdalen had called on the Sisters and asked them ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... bedding in the bows, among the sleeping Lascars, to catch any breeze that the pace of the ship might give us. The sea was like smoky oil, except where it turned to fire under our forefoot and whirled back into the dark in smears of dull flame. There was a thunderstorm some miles away: we could see the glimmer of the lightning. The ship's cow, distressed by the heat and the smell of the ape-beast in the cage, lowed unhappily from time to time in exactly the same key as the lookout ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... grown very sultry, and in the west gray-blue clouds were piled up. "We shall have a thunderstorm," said Count Hamilcar, as he stood on the porch steps and sniffed the hot air of the garden. Countess Betty stood beside him, bending her head to one side and blinking up at the clouds. Over the garden walks Bob and Billy were chasing each other. The count followed them with his eyes, then ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... the earth—one language on each plaque—the tale of how an army once attacked Perdondaris and what befell that army. Then I entered Perdondaris and found all the people dancing, clad in brilliant silks, and playing on the tambang as they danced. For a fearful thunderstorm had terrified them while I slept, and the fires of death, they said, had danced over Perdondaris, and now the thunder had gone leaping away large and black and hideous, they said, over the distant hills, and had turned ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... this storm, but when we were all again safe, and comfortably sheltered, we rejoiced that the accident had occurred, as it gave us the best possible opportunity of witnessing, in all its glory, a transatlantic thunderstorm. It was, however, great imprudence that exposed us to it, for we quitted the house, and mounted a hill at a considerable distance from it, for the express purpose of watching to advantage the extraordinary aspect of the clouds. When we reached the top of the hill half ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... camp. The country was soft, and full of holes and hollows, and it being the height of summer, the horses could not travel long stages without water; so there was nothing to do but await at the Adder Waterholes the falling of a kindly thunderstorm, to assist them to bridge the gap that lay between ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... aged Emperor Anastasius survived his Frankish ally seven years, and died in the eighty-ninth year of his age, 8th July, 518. His death was sudden, and some later writers averred that it was caused by a thunderstorm, of which he had always had a peculiar and superstitious fear. Others declared that he was inadvertently buried alive, that he was heard to cry out in his coffin, and that when it was opened some ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... grandeur and empire, flashing with Siegfried's sword, commanding the planet with Wotan's spear, upbuilding above the heads of men the castle of the gods. It dares measure itself with the terrestrial forces, exults in the fire, soughs through the forest with the thunderstorm, glitters and surges with the river, spans mountains with the rainbow bridge. It is full of the gestures of giants and heroes and gods, of the large proud movements of which men have ever dreamed in days of affluent power. Even "Tristan und Isolde," the ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... of rhythmical click and splash, a few journeys from sink to dresser, the tension broke quietly and the air was aware of it, as when a threatened thunderstorm goes by above and dissipates in wind. Feeling this, Mrs. Winterpine began to talk softly, half to herself it seemed, for her voice took on the tone of one who is much alone and ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... softly?" He introduces Luther in his own defense: "On one occasion, when asked by the Marquis Joachim I why he wrote against the princes, he returned the beautiful answer: 'When God intends to fertilize the ground, He must needs send first of all a good thunderstorm, and afterwards slow and gentle rain, and thus make it thoroughly productive.' Elsewhere he says: 'A willow-branch may be cut with a knife and bent with a finger, but for a great and gnarled oak we must use an ax and a wedge'; and again: 'If my teeth had been less sharp, the ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... news, true or false, reached us that the ice was still fast on Lesser Slave Lake. At any rate, the boat's crew expected from there did not turn up, and a couple of days were spent in anxious waiting. Some freight was delayed as well, and a thunderstorm and a night of rain set the camp in a swim. The non-arrival of our trackers was serious, as we had two scows and a York boat, with a party all told of some fifty souls, and only thirteen available trackers to start with. It seemed more than ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... glorious things can be done with processions. . . . In a real comedy the whole excitement may consist in the nervous curate dropping his tea-cup; though I do not recommend this incident for the drama of the drawing-room. But if he were nervous, let us say, about a thunderstorm, the toy-theatre could hardly represent the nervousness but it might manage the thunder-storm. It might be quite sensational and yet entirely simple; for it would largely consist of darkening the stage and making horrible noises behind ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... delirious, and it was pardonable, for it harmed no one but myself. I was filled with the desire to absorb, as much as possible, the mighty, living beauty and force that was raging on the steppe; and to get closer to it. A tempest at sea, and a thunderstorm on the steppes! I know nothing grander in nature. And so I shouted to my heart's content, in the absolute belief that I troubled no one, nor placed any one in a position to criticize my action. But suddenly, I ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky |
