"Billowing" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... other points. He invited close watch of the atmosphere a hundred yards before the gun at the next shot. Not only could the projectile be seen plainly in the beginning of its flight, but the waves of billowing air, rushing back to fill the void left by the discharge and bounding and rebounding in a tempestuous sea of gas, could be distinctly observed. This airy commotion caused the sound heard for ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... with shady walks and a good hotel; or extend the drive to Haarlem's watering-place Zaandvoort, which otherwise can be gained by steam-tram, and where, says the author of Through Noord-Holland, "the billowing is strong and strengthening". The same author tells us also that "the ponnies and asses have a separated standing-place, whilst severe stipulations warrant the bathers for trouble of the ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... vapor were mingling now and expanding: they blossomed and mushroomed, and the light of the moon came in pale iridescence from their billowing folds. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... is visited. All around me is the mellow grace of sunshine, roses, lilies, heliotropes, carnations, marigolds, nasturtiums, marguerites, and geraniums are a-bloom; and as far as the eye can reach, the green velvet of billowing acres is blended with the passion of wild poppies; the olive, the orange, and the lemon abound; yonder a vineyard lies fast asleep in the glorious noonday; the giant rubber trees in all this remarkable ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... all the other passengers who had been attracted on deck by the beauty of the evening, to the man at the helm. He was in the act of stretching out his arms to the centre of the ship, whence a cloud of smoke was billowing upwards in voluminous surges: the passengers turned pale: the sailors began to swear: "It's all over!" they shouted: "old Davy has us. So huzza! let's have some sport as long as he leaves us any day-light." Amidst an uproar of voices the majority of the crew ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... and carrying the Paris-Verdun-Metz Railroad, no longer available for traffic. And as we coasted down the hill we heard the guns at last, not steadily, but only from time to time, a distant boom, a faint billowing up of musketry fire. Some three or four miles straight ahead there were the lines of fire beyond the brown hills that ...
— They Shall Not Pass • Frank H. Simonds
... from the brow of the mountain over fifteen miles of billowing green, to where, far across a far stretch of pale blue lay a dim purple line that we knew was Staten Island. Towns and villages lay before us and under us; there were ridges and hills, uplands and lowlands, ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... with a laugh. As she sat, with her head thrown back against the chair, the light sparkling on her white skin, on her necklace of yellow topazes, and the jewelled fan in her hands, the folds of blue chiffon billowing round her, there could be no doubt of her effectiveness. Marsham could not help ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... accurately. We must have covered a great many thousand square miles of territory, and yet we had seen nothing in the way of a familiar landmark, when from the heights of a mountain-range we were crossing I descried far in the distance great masses of billowing clouds. ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... my spirits were of lead. Suddenly we got out from behind the granite wall, and there she was, standing, where I had seen her so often, beside the little waterfall that she calls the happy one. She was looking straight up at the billowing mist that dipped down the mountain, mammoth saffron rolls of it, plunging so madly from the impetus of the wind that one marvelled how it could be noiseless. Ah, you do not know Judith! That strange, unsophisticated, ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... languid lady was Mrs. Warden, wearing her thin but still brown hair in "water-waves" over a pale high forehead. She was sitting on a couch on the broad, rose-shaded porch, surrounded by billowing masses of vari-colored worsted. It was her delight to purchase skein on skein of soft, bright-hued wool, cut it all up into short lengths, tie them together again in contrasting colors, and then crochet this hashed rainbow into afghans of startling ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... carried by all; the very colour of the marbles, brown, blond, living colours, and the irregular symmetry, flower-like, of their natural patterning, are all seemingly organic and ready for life. Time has added that, with the polish and dimming alternately of the marbles, the billowing of the pavement, the slanting of the columns, and last, but not least, the tarnishing of the gold and the granulating of the mosaic into an uneven surface: the gold seeming to have become alive and in a way vegetable, and to have faded and ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... was quickly finished; they passed into the drawing-room, and took comfortable chairs on either side of the hearth. May had brought cold, clammy weather; a sky of billowing grey and frequent gusts against the window made it pleasant here by this bright fireside. Lashmar stretched his legs, smiled at the gimcracks shelved and niched above the mantelpiece, and began talking. His description of Lady Ogram was amusing, but not disrespectful; ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... single grayish-green wall as they moved forward. The hazewall's gray-green was shot by yellow and purple tinges as the sun's weak rays touched it. To the left of the Here-We-Comes, and then in front of them, appeared the same wall of billowing gas. ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... Saturn," and Stevens projected the visiray beam out toward the mighty planet. It was now an enormous full moon, almost five degrees in apparent diameter,[1] its visible surface an expanse of what they knew to be billowing cloud, shining brilliantly white in the pale sunlight, broken only ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... thing we shipped, and after taking him aboard we were soon out of the harbor of Prairie Flower, and bearing away across the plain to the southwest. In twenty minutes we ware among the billowing sunflowers, standing five or six feet high on other side of the road, which seemed like a narrow crack winding through them. Ollie reached out and gathered a handful of the drooping yellow blossoms. The pony was tied behind carrying her big saddle, and tossing her head about, and showing ...
— The Voyage of the Rattletrap • Hayden Carruth
... Pink Cliffs of the Markagunt Plateau and with its tributaries crosses one of these plateaus above the Gray Cliffs, carving a labyrinth of deep gorges. This is known as the Colob Plateau. Above, there is a vast landscape of naked, white and gray sandstone, billowing in fantastic bosses. On the margins of the canyons these are rounded off into great vertical walls, and at the bottom of every winding canyon a beautiful stream of water is found running over quicksands. Sometimes the streams ...
— Canyons of the Colorado • J. W. Powell
... which the collegians called "over the rock," stood forth all crimson against the green sward; further on, the woods began, masses of yellow and red maples, with scattered pines and oaks of more sombre hue, billowing gently upward toward the blue of ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... everything they'd ever been taught. Simpson had expected it, but it was enough to keep Kielland sleepless for three nights and drive his blood pressure to suicidal levels. At length, the blue-gray mud began billowing out of the dredge onto the platforms built to receive it, and the transport ship was notified to stand by for loading. But by the time the ferry had landed, the platform with the load had somehow drifted free of the island and required a week-long expedition into the hinterland to track ...
— The Native Soil • Alan Edward Nourse
... little and then lay down and slept. Longstreet, his knees gathered in his arms, his back to a tree, sat staring thoughtfully across the billowing country before them; Howard smoked a cigarette, stood a moment looking curiously down at the weary figure of the girl, and then strode off to the next shade for ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... the distance jerked about madly. It seemed to be struggling to free itself from an agony. The billowing smoke was filled with ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... and where the oak Sturdily grows above the sturdy field, Amid the smell of hemp and nettles rank... There, there, in meadows stretching wide, Where rich and black as velvet is the earth, Where the sweet rye, far as the eye can see, Moves noiselessly in tender, billowing waves, And where the heavy golden light is shed From out of rounded, white, transparent clouds: There it ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... Rockies go rolling and billowing far out to the east, and the entire stretch of country, from what are called the "Black Hills of Wyoming," in contradistinction to the Black Hills of Dakota, far east as the junction of the forks of the Platte, is one vast ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... into the hearts of the herd. Another falls just when they are so close that we could have sprung on their backs. At that moment they divide, and the next we are standing on a desert island, a sea of billowing backs flowing round on either side in a half-mile current of crazy buffaloes. The herd is fully five minutes in passing us. We watch them as they come, and as the last laggers pant by the mound we look westward ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... everywhere, flaming from tall silver candlesticks, and uniforms, mostly in white and silver, or white with black or violet facings, were thick in the rooms. Ladies, too, were present, in silk or satin billowing in many a fold, their powdered hair rolled high in the style made fashionable by Madame Jeanne Poisson de Pompadour. From an inner room came the music of a band softly playing French songs or airs from the Florentine opera. The air was charged with ...
— The Hunters of the Hills • Joseph Altsheler
... up Mrs. Morton on the telephone and asked her to talk to him on the wireless. A moment later their invisible messages were speeding back and forth over the miles of billowing pine tops that intervened between the two little forest homes, and no listener in on the department telephone system could either know that they were talking or tell what they said. Charley was overjoyed when Mrs. Morton told him that her ...
— The Young Wireless Operator—As a Fire Patrol - The Story of a Young Wireless Amateur Who Made Good as a Fire Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... the closing act of her life as valid on her behalf, were all other testimonies against her. The executioner had been directed to apply his torch from below. He did so. The fiery smoke rose upward in billowing volumes. A Dominican monk was then standing almost at her side. Wrapped up in his sublime office, he saw not the danger, but still persisted in his prayers. Even then, when the last enemy was racing up the fiery stairs to seize her, even at that moment did ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... dispensation of God I was recognized! Talbot turned white, and shouting, 'Save yourselves, it is the Standard-Bearer of Joan of Arc!' drove his spurs home till they met in the middle of his horse's entrails, and fled the field with his billowing multitudes at his back! I could have cursed myself for not putting on a disguise. I saw reproach in the eyes of her Excellency, and was bitterly ashamed. I had caused what seemed an irreparable disaster. Another might have gone aside ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... and watched a moment. Bomb after bomb whizzed true and hard across the hollow, just skimmed the breastwork, struck on the trench wall that showed beyond and a foot above it, and fell behind the barricade. Billowing smoke-clouds and gusts of flame leaped and flashed above the parapet. Courtenay saw the chance and took it. He plunged out into the lake of mud and plowed through it towards the barricade, the men swarming behind him, and the sergeant's bombs ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... not far from the dais, his attention was at length challenged by an upheaving and billowing of purple and black. He looked, and in the same instant what seemed to have been a kind of storm centre resolved itself cloudily into Mrs. Medora Hastings, breathlessly resuming her seat, while Mr. Augustus Frothingham, ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... or—kerosene oil! Also in the boom of the big bell there is a quaintness of tone which wakens feelings, so strangely far-away from all the nineteenth-century part of me, that the faint blind stirrings of them make me afraid,—deliciously afraid. Never do I hear that billowing peal but I become aware of a striving and a fluttering in the abyssal part of my ghost,—a sensation as of memories struggling to reach the light beyond the obscurations of a million million deaths and births. I hope to remain within hearing of that bell... And, considering ...
— Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things • Lafcadio Hearn
... black, and was wearing grey, with some of her old lace trimming it. It was a tabinet which I must have seen in my childhood. The memory of it was so remote that I felt as if I must have read about it; but I had an exact memory of the way it was made, which was billowing about the feet, and with a very straight bodice. While I looked at them she picked a rose from the wall and fastened it ...
— The Story of Bawn • Katharine Tynan
... monotonous patter of the rain, and to the distant sounds of moving horses and men, the rattle of wheels, the bugle calls, the departure of the allied troops to meet the armies of the great adventurer on the billowing plains ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... is over. We can go and see the animals again, and get home all dry, just as well as not," observed Ben, encouragingly, as Billy looked anxiously at the billowing canvas over his head, the swaying posts before him, and heard the quick patter of drops outside, not to mention the melancholy roar of the lion which sounded rather awful through the sudden gloom which filled ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... sincere. Oh, look at that divinely ridiculous Madonna!" They were now making their way out of the crooked footway behind their hotel toward the street leading to the cathedral, and she pointed to the Blessed Virgin over the door of some religious house, her drapery billowing about her feet; her body twisting to show the sculptor's mastery of anatomy, and the halo held on her tossing head with the help of stout gilt rays. In fact, the Virgin's whole figure was gilded, and so was that of the child in ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... she moved cautiously forward, till she was clear of the bushes, there to sit down upon a billowing cushion of heather which grew conveniently about as close to the edge of the bluff as it was prudent to venture. Abstractedly Anthony followed her and, after a glance about him, took his seat by her side ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... the billowing fields sailed away the gray steamer, cutting a path that sprayed and sang after. Sunlight danced and lay whitely as far as the eye could reach. It prolonged for those on shore the contour of the line of faces above ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... with my head, sounding out the boundary of that deadness, ducking down as soon as the mental murk gave me a faint perception of the wall and ceiling above me. Then I'd move aside and sound it again. Eventually I found a little billowing furrow that rose above the floor level and I crawled out along the floor, still sounding and moving cautiously with my body hidden in the deadness that rose and fell like a cloud of murky mental smoke to my sense ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... it exhibited the extraordinary feature of not being an island at all. A long, curving neck of sand, as smooth and wet as the neck of the sea serpent, ran out into the sea and joined their rock to a line of low, billowing, and glistening sand-hills, which the sinking sea had just bared to the sun. Whether they were firm sand or quicksand it was difficult to guess; but there was at least no doubt that they lay on the edge of some larger land; for colourless hills appeared faintly behind them and no sea could ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... the edge of the cushion. Its top surface was a trifle lower than our heads—a billowing, wrinkled mass of fabric. But I saw that the folds of it were rough enough to afford a footing. I thought that I could climb it. We stood erect. There was a deep shadow along here, but it was brighter on the cushion top. We could see over ...
— Beyond the Vanishing Point • Raymond King Cummings
... has it robbed me of heart and hope. Here, scarce have I assured myself that the last leaf has fallen, scarce have I watched the glistening of hoar-frost upon the evergreens, when a breath from the west thrills me with anticipation of bud and bloom. Even under this grey-billowing sky, which tells that ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... With much billowing of the lower, less stiff part of her garments, she sailed to the cloudy mirror over the magazine-filled bookcase and inspected her cap of false curls, with many prods of her large firm hands which flashed with Brazilian diamonds. Though ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... laughed Mr. Wing, as the unique outfit rumbled by. "What on earth do you suppose that is?" They followed the progress of the billowing mother and her husky infant with amused eyes, and at the corner of the street she attempted to turn the barrow, ran into a stone, upset the barrow and spilled the infant on the ground. The infant immediately sprang up, clutching the Gargantuan feeding bottle, and berated his mother ...
— The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit - Or, Over the Top with the Winnebagos • Hildegard G. Frey
... was up, broad and bright, burning over the darkened wheat-fields, when Kurt and Jerry reached home. Kurt had never seen the farm look like that—ugly and black and bare. But the fallow ground, hundreds of acres of it, billowing away to the south, had not suffered any change of color or beauty. To Kurt it seemed to smile at him, to bid ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... sea. The gray, picturesque Cathedral Range bounds it on the south; a similar range or spur, the highest peak of which is Mount Conness, on the north; the noble Mounts Dana, Gibbs, Mammoth, Lyell, McClure and others on the axis of the Range on the east; a heaving, billowing crowd of glacier-polished rocks and Mount Hoffman on the west. Down through the open sunny meadow-levels of the Valley flows the Tuolumne River, fresh and cool from its many glacial fountains, the highest of which are the glaciers that lie on the ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... crusted a moonless sky, the vast stretches of billowing sand glimmered faintly golden as a phosphorescent sea. And among the dimly gleaming waves of that endless waste the motor tossed, rocking on the rough track like ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... stages is colored the pale pink of asparagus, with faint touches of yellow, and hints of blue. At maturity it breaks into a gorgeous head of lavender-tinted, creamy pendent flowers covering the upper third of its height, billowing out slightly in the center, so that from a distance the waxen torch takes on very much the appearance of a flaming candle. For this reason, in Mexico, where the plant flourishes in even greater abundance than in California, ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... it as a wave Of ocean's billowing surge (Where Thrakian storm-winds rave, And floods of darkness from the depths emerge,) Rolls the black sand from out the lowest deep, And shores re-echoing wail, as rough blasts o'er them sweep. ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton
... no glimpse of the sea; but Robert turned the car, and driving between two gigantic hotels, ran down to a beach with sands of gleaming gold, and a background of wind-blown dunes billowing away as far as the eye could reach. The very wildness of this background gave a bizarre sort of charm to the fantastic buildings which made up the ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... Miss Ann said, but she sought the girl's hand and held it a moment in the folds of her billowing lace dress. ...
— The Comings of Cousin Ann • Emma Speed Sampson
... swear disgustedly. Not long later, a badly battered, blackened, scuffed old spacecraft came rolling up on rocket-impulse and stopped with a billowing of rocket fumes. Hoddan threw a switch and used the landing grid field he'd used on Walden in another fashion. The ships came together with fine precision, lifeboat-tube to lifeboat-tube. He heard his grandfather swear ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... the hilltops. The vermilion deepened into charred umber, and soon the west was a blackened grate; another day vanished in ashes. The filmy golden pallor of twilight now blurred the landscape; the wind increased with a gayer, madder, keener touch; the lake went billowing in shadows of gray and black, and one by one the lamps of the city sprang up, vivid as sparks from an anvil. Now and again the thin, clear music of the band drifted across from the park. The fountain glimmered in the Platz, the cafes ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... twisting little water courses, dry as a chip at the moment, and some of them so deep as to afford cover even for the biggest pony of the wild warriors of the plains. Then, to the front, the barrier ridges, streaked with deep winding ravines, were now billowing against the northward sky, and once among those tangled land waves no chances could be taken now that it was known that the Sioux had declared for war, and that Stabber's band was out to join their red brethren in the oft recurring outbreak. Until their lands were criss-crossed ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... passed, and still they fell endlessly through space, unaware of their motion except that Jupiter was now a huge orb blotting out the universe. The grim face of the giant planet was enswathed in endless billowing clouds. No one had ever penetrated to the real core. But what held their eager, straining attention was a vast blood red disk, cyclonic in character, directly beneath them. The Great Red Spot! And immediately in the center of it was the tiny, blindingly brilliant ...
— Pirates of the Gorm • Nat Schachner
... Then billowing blue, like an ocean, rolled from the shores of morn to even: And the stars, like rafts, went down: and the moon, like a ghost-ship, driven, A feather of foam, from port to port of the cloud-built isles ...
— Myth and Romance - Being a Book of Verses • Madison Cawein
... Then the billowing surges of silk and velvet swept the small, inquiring face into the background with the accustomed ease and ...
— The Transfiguration of Miss Philura • Florence Morse Kingsley
... the coming day, Travelling unseen to the East away. In his cloudy robes that lay shadowing wide, I stretched myself motionless by his side; And his eyes with their calm, unimpassioned power, Soothing my heart like an evening shower, Led in a spectral, far-billowing train, The hours of the Past through ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... getting there. The crowd around the port looked smaller, or was it simply huddling closer? Then suddenly, a wail of fear and despair went up, and there was a roar of water. The observation room walls had given. I saw the green surge of waves, and a billowing deluge rushed down upon us. I had ...
— The Worlds of If • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... would be almost continuous, but these shell-bursts were not confined to the front lines. From where Tam hung he could see billowing smoke clouds appear in every direction. Far behind the enemy's lines at the great road junctions, in the low-roofed billeting villages, on the single-track railways, they ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace
... Doctor said to one who had been under his anxious care for a few, vivid days. The little brown-bearded man with the grey- brown hair nodded in reply, but his gaze was on the billowing waste of snow, which stretched as far as eye could see to the pine-hills in the far distance. He nodded assent, but it was plain to be seen that the Young Doctor's suggestion was not in tune with ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the hill's shoulder he stopped and pointed his hand. The view from there was almost county-wide, billowing away across heights and depths to a blue merging of ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... edge of the bluff, her red cape billowing out into a scarlet banner, her hair streaming back from her face, the velvet tam flattened by the ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... in the descent, the still air vibrated with a sibilant rattle. Slade's pony snorted and jumped sideways, leaving Lennon a clear view of the big diamond-back rattlesnake that lay coiled in the middle of the trail. The gaping jaws of the angry snake and the peculiar billowing of its body so fixed Lennon's gaze that he only half glimpsed the final ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... turned to reassure their well-wisher, and in that moment a sigh went up from the crowd. Rick heard a sudden splash, and then the white mist was rising, billowing ...
— The Blue Ghost Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... images aroused by his music, is impossible. I am forced to employ the technical terminology of other arts, but against my judgment. Read Mr. W. F. Apthorp's disheartening dictum in "By the Way." "The entrancing phantasmagoria of picture and incident which we think we see rising from the billowing sea of music is in reality nothing more than an enchanting fata morgana, visible at no other angle than that of our own eye. The true gist of music it never can be; it can never truly translate what ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... Emil was a handsome fellow with a picturesque face which betrayed his vocation. The crayons and the pen-and-ink drawings that I had seen in the library were his work. He had a pale, high forehead and a thick, upright grove of very soft, brown hair which I pictured as billowing in a breeze like a field of rye. "Just the kind of son for a ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... color and exquisite adjustment of line and mass. The luminous night which enwraps the Palisades is a solemn mighty chord. The white rhythm of this statue caresses the eye that follows it. This symphony is an intricate and wonderful wave-pattern upon a sea of billowing sound in which the listener immerses himself voluptuously. The essential significance of a work of art is not to be received apart from its form, but the form is more than merely sensuous in its appeal. Finally, therefore, the color and the composition ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... windows of her home, marked by the huge golden molar that projected, flashing, from the bay window of the "Parlors." She saw the open windows of the sitting-room, the Nottingham lace curtains stirring and billowing in the draft, and she caught sight of Maria Macapa's towelled head as the Mexican maid-of-all-work went to and fro in the suite, sweeping or carrying away the ashes. Occasionally in the windows of the "Parlors" she beheld McTeague's rounded back as he bent to his work. Sometimes, even, they ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... incense broke, The vision, if it were a vision, spoke,— If it were speech that filled the quivering air With low harmonious music. Let none dare In the rude jargons of this world to fashion That sweet, wild anthem of unearthly passion. Could I from the broad-billowing ocean borrow Of Tristan's love and of Isolde's sorrow, The flood of those world-darkening surges, wrought With thoughts that lie beyond the reach of thought, Might bring me succor where weak words must fail. But Gawayne saw and heard, and passion-pale Shrank ...
— Gawayne And The Green Knight - A Fairy Tale • Charlton Miner Lewis
... beyond them, there was now no road, no hedge, no field; but there was a great broad river sweeping across their path; a mighty tumble of yellowy-brown waters, very swift, very savage; churning and billowing and jockeying among rough boulders and islands of stone. It was a water of villainous depth and of detestable wetness; of ugly hurrying and of desolate cavernous sound. At a little to their right there was a thin uncomely bridge that waggled across ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • James Stephens
... rose; the boat nodded to the leeward of the rock, with its mast stepped, its sail billowing with a rustle in the faint air, and Mungo at the sheet. The dawn came slowly, but fast enough for the departing, and the landward portion of the rock was still in shadow when Olivia stepped forth with a tear-stained face and a trembling hand on Victor's arm. He shared her sorrow, but ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... He saw the strange steel embroidery of the landing grid rising to the height of a minor mountain against the sky. He drove furiously. Beyond it. He had seen the highway system from twenty miles height, and ten, and five. From somewhere near here stolen weather rockets had gone billowing skyward with explosive war heads to shatter ...
— The Hate Disease • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... a flaming torch, and he waved it before him and laughed to see the warriors cringe. A cloud of smoke was billowing about him—he leaped to safety through ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... his excellent health and youthful energy, mind and body alike were somewhat spent. He made short work of preparation, slipped in between the fine cool linen sheets, and laid his brown head upon the soft billowing pillows, impatient neither to think nor feel any ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... as warm as summer, and there were fragrances which seemed to wash over them in waves as they passed old gardens and old orchards. There was bridal-wreath billowing above stone fences, snow-balls, pale globes among the green, beds of iris, purple-black ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... rich abundance. Over this she had worn the gray veils to smother all that color and sheen into neutral sameness with night and shadows. No wonder her face had seemed wraith-like when her startled shrinking away from the light had set all that drapery billowing ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... no longer fashioned themselves so brightly and corporeally. The melody gently developed itself, majestically billowing and swelling like an organ chorale in a cathedral, and everything around, stretching larger and higher, had extended into a colossal space which, not the bodily eye, but only the eye of the spirit could seize. In the midst of this space ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... makes you argue.) The silver pouring down from that small crescent seemed to sift through the strong golden light in a separate and distinct radiance. It shimmered on the sea of waving hills and billowing mountains that opened out before us, as if sprinkling a glitter of sequins over the vivid green and amber and purple. Wherever there was shadow this pale glimmer painted it with ethereal colours, like the backs of rainbow fish moving under water. I might have jumped out of the car and found ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... dimness of her own drawing-room, Evelyn Desmond sank gratefully into a chair, her skirts billowing softly ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... cleaned in preparation) promenade like stupid black-and-white peacocks past uninteresting apartment-houses and uninspiring upper Broadway shops, while two blocks away glorious Riverside Drive, with its panorama of Hudson and hills and billowing clouds, its trees and secret walks and the Soldiers and Sailors Monument, is nearly deserted. Together they scorned the glossy well-to-do merchant in his newly ironed top-hat, and were thus drawn together. It is written that loving the same cause makes honest friendship; ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... bed. The seaweed stood up on end like a heavy, dark vegetation and the deep currents made it wave gracefully, stretching and billowing like floating hair. ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... the sky above—slow, bright and clear—the Morning Star. Yama saw her twinkling feet pass him as she drew nearer and nearer to the sea; and as the first pink light began to show behind the pine trees she reached the surf. Flinging her arms high above her head, she plunged in, with her snowy mantle billowing round her. Long, long Yama gazed after her, but she had ...
— More Tales in the Land of Nursery Rhyme • Ada M. Marzials
... narrow entrance through which the avengers had disappeared; but they were halted by the guards and forced to content themselves by greeting every shot with an exultant cry. The streets in all directions were tossing and billowing like the waves of the sea; men capered and flung their arms aloft, shrieking; women and children waved their aprons and kerchiefs, sobbing and spent with excitement. It was a wild and grotesque scene, unspeakably terrible, ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... gush of fumes that burst in a billowing cloud out along the hall and up the stairs, he staggered forward. Tightly to his body he clutched the remaining vials. Where was Beatrice? He knew not. Everything boomed and echoed in his stunned ears. ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... over the open channel of the common. And I remember I was thinking with myself: "If the air would only become faintly visible for a moment, what a sight it would be of waste grandeur with its thousands of billowing eddies, and self-involved, conflicting, and swallowing whirlpools from the sea-bottom of this common!" when, with my imagination resting on the fancied vision, I was startled by such a moan as seemed about to break into ...
— Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood • George MacDonald
... distance. With her larboard lipping low and that long break of swishing waters against her ports which is as a croon to the seaman's ear, the St. Pierre dipped and rose and sank again to the swell of the billowing sea. Behind, crowding every stitch of canvas and staggering not a little as she got under weigh, ploughed the Ste. Anne. And all about, heaving and falling like the deep breathings of a slumbering monster, were the wide wastes ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... pardon to his share in the tragedy? And, if all this were insufficient, then I cite the closing act of her life as valid on her behalf, were all other testimonies against her. The executioner had been directed to apply his torch from below. He did so. The fiery smoke rose upwards in billowing volumes. A Dominican monk was then standing almost at her side. Wrapt up in his sublime office, he saw not the danger, but still persisted in his prayers. Even then, when the last enemy was racing up the fiery stairs to seize her, even at that moment did this noblest ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... below them—growing vaster with each passing moment. It had changed from a disc to a globe, and now, as the molten silver of its surface seemed swiftly clouding, it turned grey; then they saw its true appearance, a vast field of rolling, billowing clouds! ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... serpentine by the roadside, or in the golden bulrush blades by the lake shore, takes more than double value. It is shed upon the landscape like a spiritual and transparent veil. Most beautiful of all are the sweeping lines of pure untroubled snow, fold over fold of undulating softness, billowing along the skirts of the peaked hills. There is no conveying the charm of immaterial, aerial, lucid beauty, the feeling of purity and aloofness from sordid things, conveyed by the fine touch on all our senses of light, colour, form, and air, and ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... symmetrical slopes are so corrugated by hardened rivulets of lava that they look for all the world like folds of gray-brown cloth. Beyond Batok we could catch a glimpse of Bromo itself, belching skyward great clouds of billowing smoke and steam, while from its crater came a rumble as of distant thunder. And far in the distance, its purple bulk faintly discernible against the turquoise sky, rose Smeroe, the greatest volcano ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... them. Then it turned, slid to the deck by I know not what strange process, and, still hooded, still shrouded, still lapped about by its mummy-wrappings, seized a rope's end. In an instant the jib was set and stood on hard and billowing against the night wind. The tops'l followed. Then the figure moved forward and passed behind the companionway of ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... pedestal of green bronze—with an inset panel representing the tragedy—rose upward in the shape of billowing curling waves supporting a marble Christ standing erect with outstretched pitying hand, majestic and ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... There was a funnelling roar, sucking up earth and air, trees and brushwood; whips and lashes and splintering crashes of rain and wind and jagged light-lines; the bronchos cowering against the inner wall of the trail. Then the funnelling wind tore the pinnacled rock tops clear of the billowing mist. ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... to say that in their time they had never seen its like. The lightning split the sky into even more fearsome fiery chasms, and in the moments of wild illumination they could see the road gullied by scores of impromptu rivulets, could glimpse the broad river billowing and raging, the cattle huddling terrified in the pastures, the woods swaying and writhing in deathlike grapple. The wind hurled by them in a thousand moods and tones, all angry; a fine, high shrieking on its topmost note—a hoarse snarl—a lull, as though the straining monster were pausing ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... hall, he started toward the stair. A tall Gel rippled into view ahead, its shape flowing and wavering, now billowing out, then rising up. The shifting form undulated toward Brett. He made a move to run, then remembered Dhuva, stood motionless. The Gel wobbled past him, slumped suddenly, flowed under a door. Brett let out a breath. Never mind the fat man. There were ...
— It Could Be Anything • John Keith Laumer
... auditorium. All about that platform stood hundreds, close packed, faces raised eagerly, the better to see the slight, graceful, girlish figure occupying the center of the stage—a figure strangely familiar to Jock's eyes in spite of its quaintly billowing, ante-bellum garb. She was speaking. Jock, mouth agape, eyes protruding, ears straining, heard, as in a daze, the sweet, ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... wouldn't it make you think you were a Lady, sure enough, if you couldn't move without that lace train billowing after you; without being dazzled with diamond-shine; without a ...
— In the Bishop's Carriage • Miriam Michelson
... instant to peer out into the gloom along the stony path that ran from his house to an old foot-bridge about fifty feet away. Curling up from the gorge, mist seemed to play among the rotted planks; it rose and fell in great billowing blankets, sometimes concealing the structure ...
— The White Feather Hex • Don Peterson
... a rapid rate. The first ten years of labour in India showed twenty-seven converts, the seventh ten showed more than twenty-seven thousand. The preparation may be as slow as the solemn gathering of the thunder-clouds, as they noiselessly steal into their places, and slowly upheave their grey billowing crests; the final success may be as swift as the lightning which flashes in an instant from one side of the heavens to the other. It takes long years to hew the tunnel, to 'make the crooked straight, and the rough places plain,' and then smooth and fleet ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... curls, And her patched, uncoloured robes of common cloth. And with a change of mood I charge the elegant ladies Three times the value of the articles chosen, And thus tear from their flowery bodies Pieces of their billowing silk To deck the less ...
— Song Book of Quong Lee of Limehouse • Thomas Burke |
