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More "Torrent" Quotes from Famous Books



... more furiously, with lines of emphasis, and capitals, and exclamation-marks more and more thickly interspersed, so that the signs of his living passion are still visible to the inquirer of today on those thin sheets of mediocre paper and in the torrent of the ink. But he was a man of elastic temperament; he could not remain forever upon the stretch; he sought, and he found, relaxation in extraneous matters—in metaphysical digressions, or in satirical outbursts, or in the small details of his daily life. It amused him ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey

... possibility of pursuit by Tseng Kwofan at the head of the warlike levies of Hoonan, where each brave is considered equal to two from another province, was still present to their minds. But he unfortunately rested content with his laurels, while the Taepings swept like an irresistible wave or torrent down the ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume I • Demetrius Charles Boulger

... return home oppressed with a wealth which life proves not long enough to spend, notwithstanding the aid of dissolute and spendthrift sons. Here have we a single source of evil equal to the ruin of any people. The morals of no community could be protected against such odds. It is a mountain torrent tearing its way through the fields of the husbandman, whose trees and plants possess no strength of branch or root to resist ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware

... made to fear for their safety by a mighty torrent of yellow mud surging athwart the blue current of the Mississippi, sweeping down logs and uprooting trees, and dashing their light canoes like leaves on an angry brook. They were passing the mouth of the Missouri. A few days later they crossed ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson

... autumn, the fall of rain had been unusually great and continuous. There were frequent thunderstorms; and, on one occasion, the quantity of rain that fell was so great, as to cause a land-slip in Pizzifalcone, by which several houses were overwhelmed; and, on another occasion, the torrent of rain was so violent, that the Riviera di Chiaja was covered, to the depth of half a metre, with mud, and stones brought down by the water from the heights above. This enormous quantity of water pouring on the slopes of Vesuvius, ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville

... road. The trees crowded so close to the edge of it that he walked in their shade, with his hat in his hand. Squirrels ran playfully upon the old rail fence at his right. Quails were calling to their young broods in the wheat stubble. The low sun sent a torrent of pale gold up the ravine that opened to the west. Early September!—it was within a few days only of the ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry

... Attic prose; and, studied him I had, more than any other prose writer whatever. Paripassu, I had become sensible that others had not studied him. One monotonous song of applause I found raised on every side; something about being "like a torrent, that carries everything before it." This original image is all we get in the shape of criticism; and never any attempt even at illustrating what is greatest in him, or characterizing what is most peculiar. The same persons who discovered that Lord Brougham was the modern Bacon have also complimented ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... is raised, and you taste all life in the moment before you go. If a man achieves not that, then struggle with earth or air or the waves of the sea is desirable. Driving sleet, armies of the snow, night and trackless mountains, the leap of the torrent, swollen lakes where kelpies lie in wait, wind on the sea with the black reef and the charging breakers,—it is well to dash one's force against the force of these, and to die after fighting. But ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston

... A torrent of rain was swept against the streaming window pane, and a gust of wind shook the frame in its sockets. The watcher turned away from the window with a mute gesture of despair. No eye could pierce that black chaos. He sank again into his seat, and looked ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... blunder, defeat on defeat. On April 24, 1779, Horace Walpole says that Lord Lyttelton 'has again turned against the Court on obtaining the Seals'* November 25, 1779, saw Lyttelton go boldly into Opposition. He reviewed the whole state of the empire. He poured out a torrent of invective. As to his sinecure, he said, 'Perhaps he might not keep it long.' 'The noble Lords smile at ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang

... had been carried down the hill with the torrent of Wendovers, 'all the way from Norway. ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon

... earthly paradise; on the other, a narrower private one, a mere cart track, grass-grown, cool, and shady, leading down to the mill stream that ran behind the grounds, brawling and seething and swelled by the spring rains into quite a respectable torrent. Down this path Dora always took me to walk when she wanted me to say anything uncommonly foolish, which could serve her as food for laughter, and down this path again we must always go when that villain Hayes was of the party, and she wanted to play me off against him, or him against me, or both ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... to men Lofty as a god To those beneath him, Who has taken sins and sorrows And whose deathless spirit leaps Beneath them like a golden carp in the torrent. ...
— Japanese Prints • John Gould Fletcher

... an equal tone with his own; and there was besides in his bosom that strong passion in its strongest form which gives to everything it mingles with its own depth, and intensity, and power—which, like a mountain torrent, suddenly poured into the bed of some summer rivulet, changes it at once in force, in speed, in depth—that passion which has made dumb ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James

... Floweret was unlike them, one adored of dead and living, one to be cherished even in her dreams, one whom "Heaven Above," together with those who had "gone below," built round with a wall of spells?—and more of such talk, which Thomas thought so horrible and blasphemous that he fled before its torrent. ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard

... they stopped at the edge of a raging torrent and strained their eyes to see what lay on the other side. While they looked, a light twinkled out from among the tree-tops. Thurston caught his ...
— The Lure of the Dim Trails • by (AKA B. M. Sinclair) B. M. Bower

... sleepy German waiter first came up and glanced sullenly at the mud-tracks we left upon the floor; then he allowed his insulting gaze to trail our progress to the lunch counter by means of a perfect torrent of rain-water drippings. He went out of the room grumbling, to return a moment later with a huge mop. Thereupon he ordered us out of the place, standing ready with the mop to begin the cleansing process the instant we ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon

... the rivulets from the distant hills, the foaming current threatened to overflow its banks. Already the rising waters touched the flimsy wooden structure that spanned the torrent. Contemplatively he regarded it, and then placing his hand for a moment on ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham

... difficult to conceive of making free with Beth as with the person of the Metropolitan of Moscow, or with that of the President of the Pennsylvania Railroad. She had her dignity. It was undeniable. He imagined the surprise in her large blue eyes and the torrent of ridicule of which her tongue could be capable. He had felt the sting of its humor at their first meeting. He had no wish to test ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs

... tossing billows. Now before us ran a strange wild river of seething white, lashing among great, gray-capped, dark greenish boulders that blocked the way. High rocky banks standing close together squeezed the mighty river into a tumult of fury. Swiftly we glide down the racing torrent and plunge through the boiling waters. Sharp rocks rear above the flying spray while others are barely covered by the foaming flood. It is dangerous work. We midmen paddle hard to force the canoe ahead of the current. ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming

... was broken by the rushing music of the birds—a careless, cheery torrent of song poured forth from bramble and woodland. Distant and nearer cockcrows rang out above the melodious tumult, through which a low, confused undertone, scarcely apparent at first, was growing louder—the dull sound of the ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers

... looked speechlessly into the other's heart, seeing the passions, the contradictions, the shortcomings that went to the making of both. In that silence they drew closer together than they could have done through a torrent of words. There was no asking of forgiveness, no elaborate confession on either side; in the deep, eloquent pause they mutually saw and ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston

... after it. But short and sudden as it was, it served to show Charlton that the sheet of water before him was not a pool or a pond, but a brook or a creek over all its banks, swollen to a river, and sweeping on, a wild torrent. At the side on which Charlion was, the water was comparatively still; the stream curved in such a way as to make the current dash ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston

... by half-ashamed memories of that dance, Sadie spoiled a good bit of her work on Monday morning. The forewoman descended on her with a torrent of coarse abuse, whereupon Sadie rose suddenly from her machine, and in a burst of hysterical profanity and tears rushed out of the factory, vowing never to return. There was only one course, she decided, for her to ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr

... appreciate the sublime in art will fail to bow down before it as embodied in this wonderful statue? The majestic character of the head, the prodigious muscles of the chest and arms, and the beard that flows like a torrent to the waist, represent a being of more than mortal port and power, speaking with the authority, and frowning with the sanctions of incarnate law. The drapery of the lower part of the figure is inferior to the anatomy of the upper part. Remarkable ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting

... came out from an inner room, and seeing the Italian standing there, broke into a passionate torrent of speech, ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler

... insults, like a man who is thoroughly persuaded that between arresting him and scaling Heaven there is no difference. As may well be imagined, such astounding remarks were not uttered without interruption, and warm altercations from the Cardinal de Bissy, who, nevertheless, could not stop the torrent. At last, carried away by anger and vexation, Bissy seized the Marechal by the arm and the shoulder, and hurried him to the door, which he opened, and then pushed him out, and followed at his heels. Dubois, more dead than alive, followed also, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... she murmured, bursting into a torrent of tears. "How you must have suffered to feel so great a relief!" Then she was still, very still, and waited for ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green

... discovered the object of his visit. The ascent to this lake, through the famous Buam Defile, or Happy Pass, afforded some of the grandest scenery on our route through Asia. Its seething, foaming, irresistible torrent needs only a large volume to make it the equal of ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben

... the face of her Moxy who died in the dark, she threw herself in a passion of tears and cries upon her dead. But the man knelt upon his knees, and when Hester turned in pain from the agony of the mother, she saw him with lifted hands of supplication at her feet. A torrent of divine love and passionate pity filled her heart, breaking from its deepest God-haunted caves. She stooped and kissed the ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald

... strait itself of the Euripus does not ebb and flow seven times a day at stated times, as is reported, but the current changing irregularly, like the wind, now this way now that, is hurried along like a torrent rolling headlong down a steep mountain, so that no quiet is given to vessels there day or night. But not only did so perilous a station receive his ships, but the town was strong and impregnable, covered on one side by the sea, and very well fortified on the other towards the ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius

... regiments at Versailles that she treated all the reports from Paris with contempt. Nothing was apprehended from that quarter, and no preparations were consequently made for resistance or protection. She was at Little Trianon when the news of the approach of the desolating torrent arrived. The King was hunting. I presented to her the commandant of the troops at Versailles, who assured Her Majesty that a murderous faction, too powerful, perhaps, for resistance, was marching principally against her royal person, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... fashionable spirit of that age—there would be little in Voltaire's huge shelf of volumes, little except stray flashes of his irrepressible gaiety, to arrest and to hold us. But into the pages of "Candide" he poured the full bright torrent of his immortal wit, and with this book in our hands we can feel him and savour him ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys

... even the nobility and sweetness of his pretty fiancee, enhanced by the surrounding glamour of heiresship, failed to touch the flood gates of tender love that a pauper's hand had suddenly unloosed, to sweep as a destroying torrent through the fair garden of his most cherished hopes. What was the spell exerted by the young convict when she grappled his heart, and in the havoc of her own life carried down all the possibilities of his future peace? Personal ambition, calculating mercenary selfishness ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... she dances! How she sings! And the way she embroiders with gold—marvellous! Not even a Turkish Padishah [13] has had a wife like her!... Shall I? Wait for me to-morrow night, yonder, in the gorge where the torrent flows; I will go by with her to the neighbouring village—and she is yours. Surely Bela ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov

... It was absolutely necessary for her to get in at once if she did not mean to stay at El-Akbara. She tried to pass the grovelling Arab, but as she did so he suddenly sprang up, jumped on to the step of the carriage, and, thrusting his body half through the doorway, began to address a torrent of Arabic to the passenger within. The horn sounded again, and the carriage jerked backwards preparatory to starting ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens

... we reached the ford, which was generally passable by foot passengers, Terence was obliged to swim his horse across, and to dismount on the opposite side, in order to assist the animal up a steep clayey bank which had been formed by the torrent undermining and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various

... then in the light of early dawn, in single file they climbed the ladder, up through the scuttle. And straddling the ridgepole with daggers between their teeth, alas, they became dizzy and toppled down the steep shingles to the gutter, to be whirled away in the torrent of an April shower. Ah me! Had only the roof been flat! Then it would have been for them a reservation where they might have lived on and waited for the sound of children's feet to come again. Then when those feet had come and the old ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks

... quagmire; and the volume of water passing under the road bridge was so great that many people thought this ancient structure to be in danger of collapsing. Over at Otterford Mill, the stream swept like a torrent through a chain of wide lakes; Mr. Bates' cottage was cut off from the highroad, and the meadows behind the neighboring Foxhound Kennels were ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell

... through these places and lived are a handful to those who went in and were never seen again. The white bones of some have been found on the shores; but most were drowned; and in this water no bodies ever rise, because the thick sand that its torrent churns ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb

... and it so happened, that in some way or other, the means which the engineer had relied upon for controlling it were insufficient, and when the gates were opened every thing suddenly gave way. The water rushed out in an overwhelming torrent, as in an inundation—and undermined and carried away the platforms and stagings which had been erected for the seats of the spectators. A scene of indescribable tumult and confusion ensued. The emperor and empress, with the guests and spectators, fled precipitously together, and all narrowly escaped ...
— Nero - Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott

... silently and without complaint, even when her bare feet slipped into the deep ruts in the trail, or were painfully bruised and cut by the sharp stones and bits of wood that lay in the narrow path. Once she fell. The man addressed as Julio assisted her to her feet. The other broke into a torrent of profane abuse. ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... metaphor to picture our position, and I recall a canoe-trip in the wilds of Ontario, hundreds of miles down a long swift river. You sit in the bow of the canoe, your partner in the stern, watching ahead; and there comes a slide of smooth green water, and you go over it, and into a torrent of foaming white, which seizes you and rushes you along with the speed of ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair

... to their work, he resolved to bring about the destruction of the Voreux pit, by weakening the timbers which kept out a vast accumulation of water. He accomplished that work of madness in a fury of destruction in which he twenty times risked his life. And when the torrent had invaded the mine, imprisoning the unfortunate workers, Souvarine went calmly away into the unknown without ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson

... her a long, loose wrapper, and her lustrous hair tumbled like a brown-black torrent down over her shoulders and back. Steadfastly the brown eyes followed ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King

... proper that I should ascertain the truth by going thither. I went. On my way my mind was full of these ideas which related to my intellectual condition. In the torrent of fervid conceptions, I lost sight of my purpose. Some times I stood still; some times I wandered from my path, and experienced some difficulty, on recovering from my fit of musing, to ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown

... Administration? Little did they think that if his Lordship did not come in upon express terms, which however is doubted by some, yet without a Greatness of mind equal, perhaps superior to his Goodness, it will be impossible for him singly to stem the Torrent of Corruption. This requires much more Fortitude than I yet believe he is possesd of. Fain would I have him treated with great Decency & Respect, both for the Station he is in and the Character he sustains; but ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, vol. III. • Samuel Adams

... but was again driven backwards by the terrific flame, and perceived that the fiery current had reached Judith, who was writhing and shrieking in its embrace. Before Chowles could again stir, it was upon him. With a yell of anguish, he fell forward, and was instantly stifled in the glowing torrent, which in a short time flooded the whole chamber, burying the two partners in iniquity, and the whole of their ill-gotten ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth

... almost midnight when our hearts were made to beat in our throats by such an uproar in the scullery, as seemed to cleave the darkness like a thunderbolt. Giftie appeared to be choking in her effort to unloose, all at once, a torrent of ferocious barks. A window shook, glass broke, a shutter slammed. Then followed a moment of awful silence before she settled down to a methodical yapping. We heard Mary Ellen run ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche

... was taken up with these thoughts and reflections when his mother came to see him. She found him so much altered and emaciated that she shed a torrent of tears; in the midst of which she saluted him as she used to do, and he returned her salutation, which he had never done before since he had been in the hospital. This she looked upon to be a good sign. "Well, my son," said she, wiping her tears, "how do you do, and how do you find ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 3 • Anon.

... mistook for inspiration, the speaker was silent. Her voice was succeeded by the hysteric shrieks of several women, but the feelings of the audience generally had not been drawn onward in the current with her own. They remained stupefied, stranded, as it were, in the midst of a torrent which deafened them by its roaring, but might not move them by its violence. The clergyman, who could not hitherto have ejected the usurper of his pulpit otherwise than by bodily force, now addressed her in the tone of just indignation and ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... room, locked herself in, and falling on her knees by the side of her bed, "My God!" cried she, with a torrent of burning tears, "you will not leave this young man to die who has done no wrong, and who is so loved in this world. Oh! save him, that I may see a God of mercy, and not of vengeance." Her strength gave way, and she fell senseless on the floor. When ...
— The Queen's Necklace • Alexandre Dumas pere

... bondage of strong drink, could be produced indefinitely. There are Officers marching in our ranks to-day, who where once gripped by this fiendish fascination, who have had their fetters broken, and are now free men in the Army. Still the mighty torrent of Alcohol, fed by ten thousand manufactories, sweeps on, bearing with it, I have no hesitation in saying, the foulest, bloodiest tide that ever flowed from earth to eternity. The Church of the living God ought not—and to say nothing about religion, the people who have any humanity ought ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth

... our work a calamity occurred, which was very nearly becoming a catastrophe. By the giving way of a dam, after some heavy rains, the little stream which threaded its silvery way past Spring Hill swelled without any warning into a torrent, which, sweeping through my temporary hut, very nearly carried us all away, and destroyed stores of between one and two hundred pounds in value. This calamity might have had a tragical issue for me, for seeing a little box which contained some things, ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole

... departure had occasioned that first sorrowful evening. He gently, and as soon as he could, drew her to a retired part of the deck, where they were comparatively free from other people's eyes and ears; then, taking her in his arms he endeavoured by many kind and soothing words to stay the torrent of her grief. This fit of weeping did Ellen more good than the former one; that only exhausted, this in some ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell

... a minister's wife who never pays the slightest attention to anything that is being said to her, being engrossed in a torrent of explanation regarding her children's education and minor diseases. Once a bored companion in a momentary pause fixed her sternly with his eye and said distinctly: "But I don't give a —- about your children!" At which the lady smiled brightly ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train

... cheeks, and his eyes streamed with a flood of tears. As when a resistless river sweeps down the valley when the chill snows have melted and the languid south wind thaws the earth and suffers not the ice to remain, even so his face streamed with a torrent of weeping and his breast groaned loud with a ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler

... they were unanimous in urging her to reconsider what they called her Quixotic fancy. Lady Ludlow was greatly concerned at losing her friend for an indefinite period; she pointed out the uselessness of the proceeding; she endeavoured to overwhelm Mavis's obstinacy in the matter with a torrent of argument. She may as well have talked to the Jersey cows which grazed about Mavis's house, for any impression she produced. After a while, Mavis's friends, seeing, that she was determined, went their several ways, leaving her to make her seemingly ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte

... was a roarin' torrent coming down from the mountains that cut us off. It's only last night that ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss

... a torrent that would sweep thee, with thee strongest war-horse, to perdition," muttered Nathan: "does thee not hear how it roars among the rocks and cliffs? It is here deep, narrow, and rocky; and, though, in the season of drought, a child might step across ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird

... and Percy stepped out and closed the door. The shouting from the Barracouta kept on with undiminished vigor. Appeals and threats jostled one another in the verbal torrent. ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman

... torrent against the window, and casually glancing outside at the tossing gardens ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... considerable distance, the water was not much cooled; and though the stream's descent was so slight that on earth its current would have been very slow, here it rushed along like a mountain torrent, the reason, of course, being that a given amount of water on Jupiter would depress a spring balance 2.55 times as ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor

... the rest, as the Southern torrent, irresistible now, flowed toward Gettysburg, while Ewell and Hill led their men. The town was filled with the retreating Union troops and the cannon and rifles thundered incessantly in the rear, driving them on. ...
— The Star of Gettysburg - A Story of Southern High Tide • Joseph A. Altsheler

... kept up without intermission, the rain coming down in a perfect torrent, and the wind blowing in fitful gusts from the east. It was raw and depressing, and our hero could not help but shiver as he looked out on the turbulent waters ...
— Dave Porter and the Runaways - Last Days at Oak Hall • Edward Stratemeyer

... away at a rattling pace, with four or five couple of hounds on his traces. In an instant all was confusion, cigars were thrown away, hats pressed firmly down upon the brow, and, with a rush like the outburst of some mighty torrent, the whole field to a man swept ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley

... fell into it. The top of the Steenkampsberg was reached at about 1 a.m., after a steep climb over a rough track. The difficulty of the march was increased by a thick fog. On the far side a steep cliff, at the bottom of which was a deep donga and a mountain torrent, was encountered, and this had to be negotiated on hands and knees. Slipping and sliding down, the bottom of the donga was reached and the mountain torrent waded, and then after a steep ascent the top ...
— The Record of a Regiment of the Line • M. Jacson

... beyond Kathlyn turned to see the flames leaping along the grass. Rajah, getting a whiff of the acrid smoke, quickened his stride. The fire followed with amazing rapidity and stopped only when it reached the bed of a trickling stream, no doubt a torrent during the big rains. A great pall of smoke blotted out everything in the rear; blotted out hope, for Bruce could never pick ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath

... first because he was overwhelmed by this sudden torrent of questions, and secondly because he rarely spoke without thinking; therefore, finding him silent, she questioned ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al

... ready the troops embarked, the damn was knocked away, the Otsego poured out its torrent, and the boats went merrily down ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper

... made in estimating life. A few centuries ago, a torrent of enthusiasm set in the direction of bearing the cross into Asia, to fight for glory, and the propagation of Christianity, on the fields of Palestine. Already the old Roman military character was greatly improved on. Virtue, (manliness, ...
— The Growth of Thought - As Affecting the Progress of Society • William Withington

... the sound of running water was plainly heard, and the boys understood that the convulsion of nature had opened a reservoir somewhere in the glacier, and that the long chasm would soon become a rushing torrent. The prospect ...
— The Call of the Beaver Patrol - or, A Break in the Glacier • V. T. Sherman

... of flower-houses and vineries that ran out from the conservatory in a continuous chain—each link with its own temperature and its individual scent—and not a pane but rattled and streamed beneath the timely torrent. It was in a fernery where a playing fountain added its tuneful drop to the noisy deluge that the voices of the drawing-room sounded suddenly at my elbow, and I was introduced to Miss Belsize before I could recover ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung

... year. To gain a little time he walked swiftly on, pretending not to have noticed them: but oh! his eyes roved wildly to each side of the road for a chance of escape. He saw none. To his right was a precipitous rock; to his left a profound ravine with a torrent below, and the sides scantily clothed with fir-trees and bushes: he was, in fact, near the top of a long rising ground called "La Mauvaise Cote," on account of a murder committed there two hundred ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade

... herd of these animals when thoroughly aroused by terror. They care not for their necks. All danger in front is forgotten, or not seen, in the terror of that from which they fly. No thundering cataract is more tremendously irresistible than the black bellowing torrent which sometimes pours through the narrow defiles of the Rocky Mountains, or sweeps like a roaring ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne

... many brooks plunging down and down, rolling the rocks, to pour their volume into the growing turbid streams on the slopes. It was the voice of all that widely separated water spilled suddenly with magical power into the desert river to make it a mighty, thundering torrent, red and defiled, terrible in its increasing onslaught into the canyon, deep, ponderous, but swift—the Colorado ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey

... substance as through a furious torrent all bodies are carried, being by their nature united with and co-operating with the whole, as the parts of our body with one another. How many a Chrysippus, how many a Socrates, how many an Epictetus has ...
— Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

... new trick, and an extremely difficult one to boot; for, to be properly performed, it required not only that the glottis should remain immovable during the passage of the vinous torrent down the throat, but also that the throat should give forth at the same time a clear, uninterrupted voice. Yet Michael Kis performed this feat with masterly dexterity, to the general astonishment, and gave back the bowl for the ...
— A Hungarian Nabob • Maurus Jokai

... find became noised abroad, and now the Tarn is as a Pactolus flowing over golden sands—a mine of wealth to the simple country folk around. The river, springing from a cleft in the Lozere chain, winding its impetuous way, enriched by many a mountain torrent, through the Aveyron, Tarn, and Garonne, finally disemboguing into the Garonne, has lavished all its witchery ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... touches upon several modern and very difficult problems. I have not in the remotest degree attempted to solve them, but rather have sought to direct attention to them. In our society public opinion is exceedingly powerful. It is the torrent that sweeps away obstructing evils. The cleansing tide is composed originally of many rills and streamlets, and it is my hope that this volume may add a little to that which at last ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe

... advocate would have lasted more than two hours if the court had not silenced him. He indulged in a torrent of abuse against the other barrister, the experts in hand-writing, and the peasant, whom he threatened with a speedy consignment ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... just now—" I began, seeking to stop him, feeling as though I was face to face with a madman. But he instantly overbore me with his torrent that ...
— The Willows • Algernon Blackwood

... his oratorical gifts, the like of which has never before nor since been witnessed in Italy. He was a born orator; as vehement as Demosthenes, as passionate as Chrysostom, as electrical as Bernard. Nothing could withstand him; he was a torrent that bore everything before him. His voice was musical, his attitude commanding, his gestures superb. He was all alive with his subject. He was terribly in earnest, as if he believed everything he said, and that what he ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord

... thee, poor poet! in the race that they are running, When the jar of stormy passions makes thy temples wildly beat; Can'st thou wrestle with the torrent, can'st thou stand against their cunning, Who will crush thee without mercy, like a ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels

... sane judgment, however, her genuine humanity, and the moderating influence of her father, saved her from being swept away, like Madame Roland and most of the disciples of Rousseau, by the sanguinary torrent of revolutionary enthusiasm; and in times of wild passion and exaggeration she usually exhibited a singular soundness and sobriety of political judgment. She was sometimes mistaken, but on the whole it may well be doubted whether there is any other French writer or politician of the period of ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky

... to be met with here, especially among the more affluent classes, exceeds any moderate calculation. Nothing can more clearly manifest the necessity of erecting some dike against the torrent of immorality, which has almost inundated this capital, and threatens to spread over all ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon

... immovably before him,—a long perspective of gray uniforms and glistening white belts. The fateful book is closed with a snap, and the echoing walls ring to the quick commands of the first sergeants, at which the bayonets are struck from the rifle-barrels, and the long line bursts into a living torrent sweeping into the hall-ways ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King

... town lay northeast of the sleepy little Lobos River, which cut Santa Paloma in two. It was a pretty river, a boiling yellow torrent in winter, but low enough in the summer-time for the children to wade across the shallows, and shaded all along its course by overhanging maples, and willows, and oaktrees, and an undergrowth of wild currant and hazel bushes and blackberry vines. Across the river was Old Paloma, where dust from ...
— The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne • Kathleen Norris

... was above my reach, where efficiency in driving oxen was one of the most valued of accomplishments. I keenly felt my inability to acquire even respectable mediocrity in this branch of the agricultural profession. It was mortifying to watch the dexterous motions of the whip and listen to the torrent of imperatives with which a young farmer would set a team of these stolid animals in motion after they had failed to respond to my gentle requests, though conveyed in the ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb

... land. Then commenced a terrible war of extermination. This whole continent was drenched with blood. We fought to save our homes and our country, they to gain the supremacy. It was not a battle of a year or of half a century. As many years as I have seen, the torrent was never stayed, and when an advantage was gained, on either side, life was never spared. By slow degrees, they possessed themselves of fortress after fortress, and city after city: we, the while, growing weaker, they stronger, until we were compelled ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle

... cried, shaking his fist at the infuriate officer, and pouring out upon him a torrent of loyal abuse which I ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang

... the neck of her mamma, and fixing her lips to her cheeks, kept kissing her, till a torrent of tears gave ease to her heart. As soon as she was able to speak, "My dear mamma," said she, "I stopped to look at a pretty little chaise drawn by six dogs, and in the mean time I lost you. I looked for you, and called for you, but I ...
— The Looking-Glass for the Mind - or Intellectual Mirror • M. Berquin

... immediately afterwards broke out into taught me that this time too, as always, he had seen me through and through. I bit my lip, and durst not speak a word, for I knew very well that it would only be the signal for the old gentleman to overwhelm me beneath the torrent of teasing which was already hovering on the ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann

... the barrow and the burial, Back like a bursting torrent all men fled Back to the city and the sacred wall. But Paris stood, and lifted not his head. Alone he stood, and brooded o'er the dead, As broods a lion, when a shaft hath flown, And through the strong ...
— Helen of Troy • Andrew Lang

... arrived home he found his mother clamoring. Maggie had returned. She stood shivering beneath the torrent of her mother's wrath. ...
— Maggie: A Girl of the Streets • Stephen Crane

... young face looked monstrous wicked in the moonlight, and his eyes rolled curiously as he beheld me. Stepping up to him I freed him of his gag—an act which I had almost regretted a moment later, for he cleared his throat with so lusty a torrent of profanity that methought the heavens must have fallen on us. At last when he was done with that—"Before you leave me in this plight, M. de St. Auban," quoth he, "perchance you will satisfy me with an explanation of your unfathomable deeds and of ...
— The Suitors of Yvonne • Raphael Sabatini

... for rest that I feel—a hunger and thirst. For six long days, since my work was done, my mind has been a whirlpool, swift, unprogressive and incessant, a torrent of thoughts leading nowhere, spinning ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells

... things had poured over its devoted rusticity. Bert Smallways was only one of countless millions in Europe and America and Asia who, instead of being born rooted in the soil, were born struggling in a torrent they never clearly understood. All the faiths of their fathers had been taken by surprise, and startled into the strangest forms and reactions. Particularly did the fine old tradition of patriotism get perverted ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells

... mother," said Sholto, trying vainly to stem the torrent of denunciation which poured upon him; "I came only to see that all ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett

... his English! It was wonderful to hear him talk it. No American could say that he spoke better English than Coronado, and no American surely ever spoke it so fluently. It rolled off his lips in a torrent, undefiled by a mispronunciation or a foreign idiom. And yet he had begun to learn the language after reaching the age of manhood, and had acquired it mainly during three years of exile and teaching of Spanish in the United States. His linguistic cleverness was a fair specimen of ...
— Overland • John William De Forest

... put it on," he said in a voice that he strove to render steady. Yet scarcely had I reached the pile and taken up the breast-plate, when he recoiled again from the task. He broke into a torrent ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini

... look up, but knelt there silent, dry-eyed, till the last rustle of his going died in the night. And then, like a waiting storm, the torrent of her grief swept down upon her; she stretched herself upon the black and fleece-strewn ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois

... the days of respite that my very conscientious and very devoted collaborator allows me. I am taking up again a novel on the THEATRE, the first part of which I had left on my desk, and I plunge every day in a little icy torrent which tumbles me about and makes me sleep like a top. How comfortable one is here with these two little children who laugh and chatter from morning till night like birds, and how foolish it is to go to compose and to put on MADE UP THINGS ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert

... of ever recovering her pet. The next morning our attention was attracted by the most extraordinary noises, arising from a flock of parrots at a little distance. Now all was hushed; then again there broke forth a torrent of screams, which reminded us of the noise made by a flock of crows gathered around a solitary owl found out of its ivy-mantled tower after sunrise. What was the cause of the noise? No one could decide. Arthur suggested that the tree-tops thereabout might ...
— The Wanderers - Adventures in the Wilds of Trinidad and Orinoco • W.H.G. Kingston

... but she was too quick for me. She burst out in a torrent of angry abuse. Her resentment, dammed so long for want of opportunity, carried her away. To speak soberly and by the card, the woman was a hideous thing to see and hear; for in her wrath at me, she spared not to set forth in unshamed plainness her designs, ...
— The Indiscretion of the Duchess • Anthony Hope

... by the successes of Hannibal, whom the Romans fancied they saw already at their gates; all these sentiments caused so violent an emotion, that during the first moments of their agitation, the Romans were unable to come to any resolution, or do any thing but give way to the torrent of their passion, and sacrifice floods of tears to the memory of a city which fell the victim of its inviolable fidelity(720) to the Romans, and had been betrayed by their unaccountable indolence and imprudent delays. ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin

... had now burst upon them in a perfect fury. Night had set in, but flash after flash of lightning lit up the sky. One moment, objects were rendered distinctly visible as they dashed by, the next they were lost in gloom. The sparks from the locomotive were quenched in the falling torrent and the roar of the train was silenced by the loud ...
— The Expressman and the Detective • Allan Pinkerton

... season the valleys and low lands by the sea are overflown with water; and then the small drills that run into the sea are great rivers; and the gullies, which are dry for 3 or 4 months before, now discharge an impetuous torrent. The low land by the seaside is for the most part friable, loose, sandy soil; yet indifferently fertile and clothed with woods. The mountains are chequered with woods and some spots of savannahs: some ...
— A Continuation of a Voyage to New Holland • William Dampier

... of the workers had taken a cross-cut toward it, while Mr. Clifford was on the piazza, shouting for them to hurry. Great drops splashed against the window-panes, and the heavy, monotonous sound of the coming torrent seemed to approach like the rush of a locomotive. Webb, with the last load, is wheeling to the entrance of the barn. A second later, and the horses' feet resound on the planks of the floor. Then all is hidden, and the rain pours against the window like a cataract. In swift alternation of ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe

... combined to procure for me some attention and some indulgence hitherto. Answers had been given with precision, explanations made at length, and anxiety shown to satisfy my inquiries. But this could not last; the inexorable necessities of public business coming back in a torrent upon the official people after this momentary interruption, forbade them to indulge any further consideration for an individual case, and I saw that I must not stay any longer. I was rapidly coming to be regarded as a hinderance to the movement of public affairs; and the recollection that ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey

... his swift strokes proved that he was a good swimmer. In a moment or two he caught up with Bobsey, for the current was too swift to permit the child to sink. Then, with a wisdom resulting from experience, he let the torrent carry him in a long slant toward the shore, for it would have been hopeless to try to stem the tide. Running as I never ran before, I followed, reached the bank where there was an eddy in the stream, sprang in up to my waist, seized them both as they approached and dragged them to solid ground. ...
— Driven Back to Eden • E. P. Roe

... mentioned by Curate Percy as living with Smith in Highbury may or may not be the same as the lady he married in Maidenhead. If one short sweet spell of constancy and heart repose interrupted the plunging torrent of his profligate life, we will not deprive him of that long past possibility. After that conjectural date, alas, he seems to have plunged deeper and deeper into the shaking quagmires ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton

... his way, attracted by the coolness of the water. He stood beneath the sonorous torrent and he thrilled with voluptuous shivers as he received on his back the force of the falling stream. A sensation of freshness overspread his body, causing him to sigh with pleasure. His limbs seemed to relax beneath the icy touch. His chest broadened, ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... rose in denunciation of sin. Those who had traveled said that he had the manner of a preaching friar—the simple language, so refined and yet so homely and direct, the real, the inspired word, the occasional hastening torrent of words. When he had occasion to address one of the societies of ladies for the promotion of something among the poor, his style and manner were simplicity itself. One might have said there was a shade of contempt in his familiar and not seldom slightly humorous remarks ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... breathlessly, and then let the words out in a torrent. "Louis, I know I've got to marry you. Do you understand that? It's—it's inevitable. It was from the minute I met you. You'll never understand that, not being a Kelt, though. I know it quite well. And I'm afraid I'm going to shy at it. And, for my sake ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles

... editors of the collected works of Mr. Bunyan,—until about the year 1780, when it was first re-published in an edition of his works, with notes, by Mason and Ryland. The evident object of this treatise was to aid Christian efforts, under the Divine blessing, in stemming the torrent of iniquity, which, like an awful flood, was overspreading this country. The moral and religious restraints, which the government under the Commonwealth had imposed, were dissolved by the accession of a debauched prince to the throne of England; ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... irregularity is peculiarly delightful where gracefulness and freedom of outline and detail are, as they always are in mountain countries, the chief characteristics of every scene. It is well that, where every plant is wild and every torrent free, every field irregular in its form, every knoll various in its outline, one is not startled by well built walls, or unyielding roofs, but is permitted to trace in the stones of the peasant's dwelling, as in the crags of the mountain side, no evidence of the line or the mallet, but the operation ...
— The Poetry of Architecture • John Ruskin

... grace invented by a wise Rabbi for these difficult occasions, yet so far as was visible it was only the Jewish guests—comically distinguished by serviettes shamefacedly dabbed on their heads—who fidgeted under the pious torrent. These were no doubt fearful of boring the Christians whose precious society the Jew enjoyed on a parlous tenure. In the host's son Julius a superadded intellectual impatience was traceable. He had brought back from Oxford a contempt ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill

... Great Wall. Even the splendid arches of a bridge, built to span its ancient flood, were almost submerged in sand. Instead of the constant stream of water that once gladdened the lowlands, there is in each rainy season a mad torrent that leaves a ruinous deposit behind, and, later, long weeks when the river-bed is as dry as a desert. So it was when I saw it last fall; and the old stone bridge, almost sand-covered like an Egyptian ruin, was at once a melancholy monument to the gladness ...
— Where Half The World Is Waking Up • Clarence Poe

... portage was necessary around a half-mile canyon through which the river, a rushing torrent, tumbled in the interval over a series of small falls, and all the way the perpendicular walls of basaltic rock that confined it rose on either side to a height of fifty to seventy- five feet above the seething water. Just below this canyon another river joined us ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace

... enemies. The leisurely pace at which they were proceeding changed instantly into a gallop on the part of those conscious of danger. The impulse was communicated to those in front, and in a few seconds the whole herd was tearing along like a mighty torrent. ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty

... could have destroyed it by his reasoning, because he could not by victory. No one answered him; it was evident that he was not asking advice, but that he had been talking all this time to himself; that he was contending against his own reflections, and that, by this torrent of conjectures, he was seeking to impose upon himself, and endeavouring to make others participators ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur

... by this time. He forgot his reserve; and in his indignation poured forth a torrent of almost incoherent, but enlightening, ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker

... leader stood aside, and one by one, and never more than one at a time, they made the perilous passage. At the bend in the middle their weight forced the tree under, and they felt for their footing, up to the ankles in the cold, driving torrent. Even the little children made it without hesitancy, and then the dogs whining and reluctant but urged on by the man. When the last had crossed over, ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London

... tribute to foreign countries in the shape of freight and passage moneys. Our grain and meats have been taken at our own docks and our large imports there laid down by foreign shipmasters. An increasing torrent of American travel to Europe has contributed a vast sum annually to the dividends of foreign shipowners. The balance of trade shown by the books of our custom-houses has been very largely reduced ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume IX. • Benjamin Harrison

... stooping to feed again,—the lurid flapping surges and the smoke and terrible rushing and roaring hiding all that is gentle and orderly in the work. But as soon as the deep forest was reached, the ungovernable flood became calm like a torrent entering a lake, creeping and spreading beneath the trees where the ground was level or sloped gently, slowly nibbling the cake of compressed needles and scales with flames an inch high, rising here and there to a foot or two on dry twigs and clumps of small bushes ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various

... assistance of trail and muscle, the five miles were covered, and we came to a dip in the earth which some bygone torrent had hollowed out, and so given a chance for a little moisture to be retained to feed the half-dozen cottonwoods and rank grass, that dared to struggle for existence in that baked up sage-brush waste which the government has set aside for ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson

... borne on a torrent of strange thoughts. How could this man, who spoke with such impressive frankness, with such persuasiveness, be the abandoned creature that she had of late believed him? With Adela's secret warm in her heart she could not but feel an interest in Hubert, and the interest was becoming something ...
— Demos • George Gissing

... remembered the tortures of suspense she had experienced for the last fortnight, and the joy that had lit up her face vanished; she frowned and overwhelmed Pierre with a torrent of reproaches ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy

... In frantic haste, the unhappy creature coursed round the square, followed by its pursuers, who soon caught it by the tail, then by an ear, then by the nose and the other ear, and a fore leg and two hind ones, and finally hurled it over the fence, amid a torrent of shrieks which only a Pitcairn pig could utter or a Pitcairn mind conceive. It fell with a bursting squeak, and retired in grumpy silence to ruminate over the dire consequences of a too earnest gaze in the face ...
— The Lonely Island - The Refuge of the Mutineers • R.M. Ballantyne

... shook their crests like tongues of fire, and flashes of bloody light gleamed along their foam. Their sound came mightier and mightier on his senses; his brain grew giddy with the prolonged thunder. Shuddering he drew the flask from his girdle, and hurled it into the center of the torrent. As he did so, an icy chill shot through his limbs: he staggered, shrieked, and fell. The waters closed over his cry. And the moaning of the river rose wildly into the ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various

... spent, thou knowest So, in faint, half-glad despair, From the summit thou o'erflowest In a fall of torrent hair; Hiding what thou hast created In a half-transparent shroud: Thus, with glory soft-abated, Shines the moon through ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald

... the traveller will find it impracticable to cross them: at another he may do so with ease; and only from the remains of debris in the branches of the trees high above, can he judge of the furious torrent they ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt

... astrological date of his birth. If, in after times, in their impotent rage they destroyed every accessible vestige of the birth, life and death of Him, who in his boundless mercy to all creatures had revealed their carefully concealed mysteries and doctrines in order to check the ecclesiastical torrent of ever-growing superstitions, yet there had been a time when he was met by them as an Avatar. And, though they destroyed, ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various

... had escaped from was nothing compared to that which threatened them; the whole pack now came sweeping like a torrent down the hill, with a simultaneous yell which might well strike terror into the bravest. The horse, which had fallen down when the wolf seized him, was still not clear of the sleigh, and the other three were quite unmanageable. McShane, Joey, and the courier, at last drew him clear from the track; ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat

... Chinese drovers, carrying long bamboo poles, riding on the outskirts of each mob and directing its course. Villagers, on seeing the clouds of dust and hearing the thunder of hoofs, hurry out to try and divert the equine torrent from their crops, but in vain. The whirlwind rushes by, leaving a broad, well-beaten track, whereon few signs of banks, gardens or vegetation can be discerned. It is the Emperor's tribute and there ...
— Life and sport in China - Second Edition • Oliver G. Ready

... never saw anything like it. I had quite an escort of cavalry, two horsemen, who rode side by side with me the whole way to the mountain, and then, when we had to dismount and climb up through the boulders of some dry torrent course, I had two linkmen or torchbearers, leaping on the crest of the ditch on either side, and lighting me right up to the door of the cabin. It was a picture that Rembrandt might ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan

... flood that instantly filled the yard and swept onward and outward, irresistibly, through the narrow gorge of the gates. Impossible to realize this as the force which, when distributed over the great spaces of the mills, performed an orderly and useful task! for it was now a turbid and lawless torrent unconscious of its swollen powers, menacing, breathlessly exciting to behold. It seemed to Janet indeed a torrent as she clung to the side of the gatehouse as one might cling to the steep bank of a mountain brook after a cloud-burst. And suddenly ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... expostulate with her mistress on her neglect of her husband. She heard her patiently; and the same day, going to his room, paid him some small attention—handed him his medicine, I believe, but clumsily, because ungraciously. The next moment, one of his fits of pain coming on, he broke into such a torrent of cursing as swept her in stately dignity from the room. She would not go near ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald

... unaffected by the scenes of vice and of the misery which is its consequence, every where presented to their notice. It is not until the mind is under the gracious influence of the Spirit of God, that men feel any anxiety to stop the torrent of evil, and endeavour to become the humble instruments of converting the sinner and saving his soul. Many, in fact, who feel deeply interested in their neighbours' temporal comforts and prosperity, feel little anxious to supply their spiritual wants; and to this may be traced the opposition ...
— The Church of England Magazine - Volume 10, No. 263, January 9, 1841 • Various

... as a positive irritant upon the temperament of the artist; and since he had turned from his work in a passion of disgust at the dramatic obtuseness of his generation, he had felt more than ever the need of some intellectual outlet for the torrent of his imagination. As a wife, Virginia was perfect; as a mental companion, she barely existed at all. She was, he had come to recognize, profoundly indifferent to the actual world. Her universe was a fiction except the part of it that ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow

... merchant, and probably not as much."—Abbott's Teacher, p. 27. "It shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come."—Matt., xii, 32. "Which no body presumes, or is so sanguine to hope."—Swift, Drap. Let. v. "For the torrent of the voice, left neither time or power in the organs, to shape the words properly."—Sheridan's Elocution, p. 118. "That he may neither unnecessarily waste his voice by throwing out too much, or diminish his ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... thought there was enough water, and told the wand to stop. He did not know the word of command, and so the wand went on just the same. In his rage, he took a chopper, and cut the wand in two, but instead of stopping it brought twice as much; a double lot of pails appeared, and at last the torrent of water washed away the ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various

... egalement couler la Reuss sous l'ancien pont ou l'on voit la Danse de la Mort. Mr. Macgregor a ose descendre cette riviere (qui est un torrent tres dangereux plus bas) en perissoire. Ce n'est ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al

... into the stream, And safe without a bruise or wound The cataract had borne him down Into the gulf profound. 70 His dam had seen him when he fell, She saw him down the torrent borne; And, while with all a mother's love She from the lofty rocks above Sent forth a cry forlorn, 75 The lamb, still swimming round and round, Made answer ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth

... seemed to know neither shame nor fear. When the female spectators detected at a glance that this seeming young National Guardsman was a woman, their indignation found vent in strong language, for the torrent of execration seems to flow more freely from feminine lips when the object is a woman than if it be one of the opposite sex; but the only response of the victim was to glare right and left with heightened colour and flashing eyes, in marked contrast to the cowardly crew that followed her. If ...
— The Insurrection in Paris • An Englishman: Davy

... were afraid to move lest they should run into danger. The Angrognians, emboldened by this interposition of Providence, issued forth from their retreats, and by means of their knowledge of the locality cut off the escape of their enemies, and forced them over the precipitous rocks into the foaming torrent, where large numbers perished, including a man of gigantic size named Saquet, whose eventful death has caused the pool in which he fell to be ...
— The Vaudois of Piedmont - A Visit to their Valleys • John Napper Worsfold

... bliss his scanty fund supplies. Dear is that shed to which his soul conforms, And dear that hill which lifts him to the storms; And as a child, when scaring sounds molest, 205 Clings close and closer to the mother's breast, So the loud torrent, and the whirlwind's roar, But bind him to his native ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith

... despair seized him; he bit his nails and tore his hair with fury, and prayed Heaven to help him hate her as she deserved, "the blind, insolent idiot!" Yes, these bitter words actually came out of his mouth, in a torrent of injury. ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade

... with rounded shoulders bending to the blast of this domestic tempest, accentuating only each pause in the torrent of his wife's eloquence by an angry growl, "There is no treasure! Go away, woman!" Exasperated by the sight of his patiently bent back, she would at last walk round so as to face him across the table, and clasping her robe with one hand she stretched the other lean arm and claw- like hand to ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad

... arch, to which access is obtained by a path along the precipice. In the centre of this bridge there is an opening through which the traveller may gaze down into the infinite depth of the abyss, at the bottom of which rolls the torrent, its terrible roar mingled with the incessant screaming of thousands of birds. Sixty feet above this bridge is a second, fifty feet long by forty wide, and not more than eight feet thick in the middle. To serve as a parapet, the natives have made a slender balustrade ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne

... his hand he held a pair of drawers, which he had apparently been about to assume when I arrived. Shaking this garment vehemently with one hand, while with the other he gave me a cigar, he broke out at once in a torrent of argument on the topic of the preceding day. I made no reply; but at the first pause suggested that he had better dress himself. To this he paid no attention, but stamped round the room, continuing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various

... streamed like a rivulet down the steps of their cellar; "we must manage to arouse your father, or the morning'll never see him alive!" and she pushed and shook the inanimate clog that lay in the corner, while the torrent still flowed on, until fear for the child's safety made her quit her efforts with its father, and snatching the infant from the cradle, and bidding Nannie follow her, she rushed hastily out to seek help in order to remove her miserable ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith

... sweetest thing on earth; I love her, and I 'm going to make her happy!" Just as easy, just about the same amount of breath required; but he couldn't say it! He watched the rain stream and hiss against the leaves and churn the dust on the parched road with its insistent torrent; and he noticed with precision all the details of the process going on outside how the raindrops darted at the leaves like spears, and how the leaves shook themselves free a hundred times a minute, while little runnels of water, ice-clear, rolled over their edges, soft and quick. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... tongue: but if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as lief[42] the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hands thus;[43] but use all gently: for in the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it offends me to the soul, to hear a robustious perrywig-pated fellow[44] ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare

... Wauchope's brigade. Just then the battle broke out with greater fury than ever. What happened in the dervish army may be guessed. Out of immediate danger and re-formed, the Khalifa and Yacoub determined upon a second attack. With a rush like a mountain torrent three columns spouted from shallow ravines, and at a break-neck run came forward. Part of Wad Melik's men uprose from the west sides of Surgham, the Khalifa and Yacoub came upon us from the south-west, and a smaller ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh

... mountain slopes, the pine-woods and the glittering walls of rock, and in the colours of the foam-bow suspended amidst the spray of the swift down-thundering cataract. In the ever-changing colours but motionless form of this bow hanging over the downward rush of the torrent Faust finds a symbol of human life suspended with its ever-varying hues above the ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill

... part of it was the ancient bed of a mountain torrent, whose gushing waters had, owing to some antediluvian convulsion of nature, been diverted into another channel. The whole scene was an absolute chaos of rocks which had fallen into the torrent's bed from the precipice that hemmed ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne

... the noble Purna took his way Till India's fields and plains were lost to view, Then through the rugged foot-hills upward climbed, And up a gorge by rocky ramparts walled, Through which a mighty torrent thundered down, Their treacherous way along the torrent's brink, Or up the giddy cliffs where one false step Would plunge them headlong in the raging stream, Passing from cliff to cliff, their bridge of ropes Swung high above the ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles

... this form over the surrounding country, we may judge from the scientific calculation that 315,000 tons fell in Naples alone! Everywhere appeared the same scenes of desolation, the same dreary tint, for so thickly had this aerial torrent of ashes descended, that buildings, trees and plants were completely hidden by it, the whole landscape suggesting the idea of a recent heavy fall of dirty-coloured snow. Paesi ridenti, indeed! It was a land of ugliness and mourning, a city of stifling ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan

... be to a passage in Plutarch's Alcibiades, where Phaeax is thus described:—'He seemed fitter for soliciting and persuading in private than for stemming the torrent of a public debate; in short, he was one of those of whom Eupolis says:—"True he can talk, and yet he is no speaker."' Langhome's Plutarch, ed. 1809, ii. 137. How the quotation was applied is a matter ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell

... first wound along a deep ravine with rugged precipitous sides, mostly clothed with evergreen underwood from which huge masses of rock would now and then emerge, and sometimes overhanging a rushing torrent which had been swelled by the recent heavy rains and thus enhanced the effect on this glorious sunny morning. The waterfalls and cascades sparkled in a hundred colours, wheeling, foaming, and dashing ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth

... dear. Already, in her remembrance, she had placed a shrine to which she might go, in silence, when things became too hard. She would have written to Alden, if she had had a sheet of paper, and an envelope, and a stamp, but she had not, and dared not face the torrent of questions she would arouse ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed

... Why, Dios, Senor Capitan!" cried the General, his eyes gleaming with excitement. "Why, she could not tell you a tenth of the truth." And he launched into a long narrative of the oppressions in Cuba. The words came like a torrent, mostly Spanish, occasionally English; and Franklin, sitting there fascinated, his cigar forgotten, could think of nothing save that the daughter's fluency ...
— The Mermaid of Druid Lake and Other Stories • Charles Weathers Bump

... was now a rushing torrent, Harshaw threw the cattle into a draw green with young grass and made camp ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine

... one the sounds grew quieter; the barricade was taken. The insurgents were retreating to La Chapelle and Belleville in disorder; the soldiers of the line rushed like a torrent into the Avenue de Clichy, leaving a tricolour flag hoisted upon ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton

... grew rocky and less sandy, the colours duller. Even the palmetto found scanty sustenance, and huge boulders, strewn as though some vast torrent had passed through the plain, alone broke the desolate flatness. The dusty road pursued its way, invariably straight, neither turning to one side nor to the other, but continually in front of me, a long ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham

... the front; but he was well beaten and well wounded for his pains, and constrained at last to disengage himself, and to take the course he had at first neglected; opening his battalion to give way to this torrent of Boeotians, and they being passed by, taking notice that they marched in disorder, like men who thought themselves out of danger, he pursued and charged them in flank; yet could not so prevail as to ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne

... portals of a solemn wood, with gray trunks of trees everywhere around us and impenetrable foliage above our heads, the deep silence only broken by fitful songs of birds. To this succeeded a blank district of barren shale cleft into great gullies by many a wintry torrent. Presently we found ourselves at an enormous height above the river, on the ledge of a precipice which shot down almost perpendicularly on one side to the bed of the stream.... A little past this place we came upon a very singular ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various

... overflowing with tears, in bounded his sister, Seraphine Duchatel, exclaiming: "And is this the creature that has stood between me and Claude? and brought here, too, to flout me to my face! I'll not endure it;" and she burst into a fresh torrent of tears. ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege

... blue sky, the bright sunshine, the rushing torrent, the songs of birds, "sweet as children's prattle is," the breath of the meadows, the glow of effort, the beauty of poetry, the achievement of thought, the thousand and thousand real pleasures of life, are inaccessible to him "who has a ...
— The Call of the Twentieth Century • David Starr Jordan

... Prof. Flinders Petrie undertook to excavate for the Palestine Exploration Fund in the lofty mound of Tel el-Hesi in Southern Palestine. Tel el-Hesi stands midway between Gaza and Hebron on the edge of the Judaean mountains, and overlooking a torrent stream. His excavations resulted in the discovery of successive cities built one upon the ruins of the other, and in the probability that the site was that of Lachish. The excavations were resumed by Mr. Bliss in the following year, and the ...
— Patriarchal Palestine • Archibald Henry Sayce

... clenched her hands, and stiffened visibly. Had the man been her social equal or any other than her master, her pent-up wrath and indignation would have broken forth in a torrent of scathing abuse. ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren

... departure of the Snowflake from Bergen, our three travellers found themselves trotting through a wild glen on each side of which rose a range of rugged mountains, and down the centre of which roared a small river. The glen was so steep, and the bed of the torrent so broken, that there was not a spot of clear water in its whole course. From the end of the lake out of which it flowed, to the head of the fiord or firth into which it ran, the river was one boiling, roaring mass ...
— Chasing the Sun • R.M. Ballantyne

... The torrent of tears which ran from his eyes prevented him from saying more. The King and his Viziers, whom this scene had rendered very attentive to the conversation, said then to ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various

... Superior sorrows swell'd his royal breast; Himself his orders to the heralds bears, To bid to council all the Grecian peers, But bid in whispers: these surround their chief, In solemn sadness and majestic grief. The king amidst the mournful circle rose: Down his wan cheek a briny torrent flows. So silent fountains, from a rock's tall head, In sable streams soft-trickling waters shed. With more than vulgar grief he stood oppress'd; Words, mix'd with sighs, thus ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer

... often you will note, in the course of a walk, little drinking-fountains contrived at the angle of a building, or in the thick walls bordering the bulwarks or enclosing public squares: glittering threads of water spurting through lion-lips of stone. Some mountain torrent, skilfully directed and divided, is thus perpetually refreshing the city,—supplying its fountains and cooling its courts.... This is called the Gouyave water: it is not the same stream which sweeps and purifies ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn

... the narrow stairway I was almost overthrown by a torrent of children pouring down from the flats above. In the dim light of a gas-burner I saw that Bobsey was one of the reckless atoms. He had not heard my voice in the uproar, and before I could reach ...
— Driven Back to Eden • E. P. Roe

... sure Stanislaus enjoyed the long ride. It would be strange if he, a nobleman of the finest cavalry nation in the world, were not a good horseman. He loved the smell of the open fields, he loved the boisterous song of the mountain torrent. The hills and the plains were his home, for the hills and the plains were nearer to God than the houses ...
— For Greater Things: The story of Saint Stanislaus Kostka • William T. Kane, S.J.

... still? and silent all? Ah! no;—the voices of the dead Sound like a distant torrent's fall, And answer, 'Let one living head, But one, arise,—we come, we come!' 'Tis but the living ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy

... as a rectangular spit in the line of the shore, with the expanded stream widening into an estuary on its upper side, and the open sea on the lower, it marks the scene of an obstinate contest between antagonist forces,—the powerful sweep of the torrent, and the not less powerful waves of the stormy north-east; and exists, in consequence, as a long gravelly prism, which presents as steep an angle of descent to the waves on the one side as to the current on the other. It is a ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller

... am," he answered. This is what crippled his Othello, and made his scene with Tubal in "The Merchant of Venice" the least successful to him. What it was to the audience is another matter. But he had to take refuge in speechless rage when he would have liked to pour out his words like a torrent. ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry

... gave him, he reared, and swerved and I fell right on my face in the froth. I got up and began to run through the water; then I came to some stones and I knew I was saved, though the water was up to my knees and rushing by like a torrent. When I had clambered up the beach I thought again of poor Lucifer. I looked about and saw him a little way off. He was shaking and tossing his dear black head, and neighing, though I really did not hear him, for the wind was in my ears; his body was stock still, I could ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle

... laid down the letter and looked steadily into the fire. What a torrent memory had let loose upon him! he lived the old years all over again, he saw the dear familiar scenes buried in the half-burned coals, the smiling associations of the past. "Poor Bob" he said, "and I have never seen him once in all ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera

... bitter lamentation for the number and magnitude of the calamities impending over the Israelitish people." But the correct view rather is, that the prophet, when, in his inward vision, he sees the divine judgments not remaining and stopping at Samaria, but poured out like a desolating torrent over Judah and Jerusalem, suddenly sinks his own consciousness in that of his suffering people. We have thus here before us an imperfect symbolical action, similar to that more finished one which occurs in Is. xx. 3, 4, and which can ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg

... him; for he moved with a mighty throng, a people of pilgrims, a nation of worshippers. But these were not of his faith; they bore upon their foreheads the smeared symbols of obscene gods! Still, he could not escape from their midst; the mile-broad human torrent bore him irresistibly with it, as a leaf is swept by the waters of the Ganges. Rajahs were there with their trains, and princes riding upon elephants, and Brahmins robed in their vestments, and swarms of ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn

... my entrance precipitated the catastrophe. I startled you both, and behold the result! Nobody dreamed of convicting me, and this is voluntary confession, so I expect you all to respect it; the smallest unkindness will cause me to leave the room in a torrent of tears." ...
— Princess • Mary Greenway McClelland

... rolled back the sea from his footstool, as Warwick and his disordered troop (often and aye, dazzled here by Oxford's star, there by Edward's sun, dealing random blows against each other) have resisted the general whirl and torrent of the surrounding foe. To add to the rout, Somerset and the on-guard of his wing had been marching towards the earl at the very time that the cry of "treason" had struck their ears, and Edward's charge was made; these men, nearly all ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... great Black Forest of Germany babbled in playful melody no more, but rushed on with deafening din, mingling their torrent roar with the wild creaking of the huge oaks, the rustling of the firs, the howling of the affrighted wolves, and the hollow voices of ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds

... the Alps do not end in Savoy, but extend through the south-eastern parts of France, almost to the mouths of the Rhone. Packed closer together than in most parts of Switzerland, the mountains of Dauphiny are furrowed by deep valleys, each with its rapid stream or torrent at bottom, in some places overhung by precipitous rocks, in others hemmed in by green hills, over which are seen the distant snowy peaks and glaciers of the loftier mountain ranges. Of these, Mont Pelvoux—whose double pyramid can be ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles

... pistol-shot of the commissary buildings. But Ruiz Gregorio, weighing all the possibilities, found them elastic enough to serve the purpose. A well-calculated shot from behind a sheltering boulder, the heaving of the body into the swift torrent of the Pannikin, and the thing was done. What damning evidence might afterward come to the light of day, if, indeed, it should ever come to light, would be fished out of the stream far enough from any of the ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde

... more notorious. A pool of water still smoking showed where Annapla's punch-bowl had done its work; but for the blood and that, the alarms of the night might have seemed to him a dream. Far off to the south a dog barked; nearer, a mountain torrent brawled husky in its chasm. Perfumes of the wet woodland mingled with the odours of the shore. And the light he carried made Doom Castle more dark, more sinister and mysterious than ever, rising strong and silent from his feet ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro

... a faint creak was occasionally heard aloft as the strain upon the spars increased, the sails "went to sleep," the sheets tautened out, the ripple under the bows grew louder and louder, until it emulated the rush of a mountain torrent, and the foam gathered round the cutwater, hissing along the side, and swirling far away in our wake, as the "Juno," yielding to the freshening breeze, swept out past the Needles, and hauled up a ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood

... mountain stream, where the bridge had either been carried away by the recent flood or had been destroyed by the Peruvians. They were also informed that quite a large army was gathered upon the opposite bank to arrest, with the aid of the rushing torrent, the farther advance of the Spaniards. Pizarro immediately ordered a halt. De Soto, with a hundred horsemen, was sent forward to reconnoitre, and, if possible, to open the path. Almagro, with two hundred footmen, followed closely behind to support ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott

... on foot, the committee by whom it was conducted reported the result of their labours about the end of April. Seventy-nine thousand pounds were contributed; it would have been twice the sum, but for the distress, and the disturbance of public affairs by the torrent of revolution which was sweeping over the continent. The birthplace of Mr. Cobden, in Sussex, was purchased for him, and the remainder of the money invested according to his wish. A sum of L10,000 was raised ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... fort he had built on the bank of the Mississippi, and came through the wilderness to Harrodsburg. They lived on the buffaloes they shot, and when they came to the Tennessee River, which was then in flood, they crossed the swift torrent on a raft of logs bound together with grapevines. At Harrodsburg they found the land court open, and thronged with an eager, jostling crowd of settlers and speculators, who were waiting to enter lands in the surveyor's office. Even the ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt

... Government. I answered that such remedies must be gradual, while the situation of Ireland was pressing at this moment; and that perhaps nothing had contributed more to the discontents now prevalent, than the foolish expectations of wealth to be poured like a torrent into the country by a free trade. To this he agreed, but said that laws might certainly be devised by which such remedies might be brought forward and hastened. Then he went into the nature of absentee laws. Direct absentee taxes were, he said, highly objectionable, but many things might be thought ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos

... follows the torrent of that terrible criticism. Pope was not such a fool as to try to make out that Addison was a fool. He knew that Addison was not a fool, and he knew that Addison knew it. But hatred, in Pope's case, had become so great and, I was ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton

... gorge, a torrent ran recklessly, tearing at its rocky confines with raging hands, and crying out in many voices like a multitude bent on some deed of vengeance—hurrying, delaying, turning on itself, maddening itself. Its bellowing seemed a part of universal ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray

... scrupulous precision and unfailing nerve, though quite prepared to see the red whirlwind suddenly turn back and blot himself, the audacious Grom, and the whole shuddering tribe from the face of the outraged earth. But no such thing happened. The torrent of flame raged straight up the valley, cutting a path some fifty odd paces in width, and leaving a track of smoldering, winking, red stems and stumps behind it. And all the beasts hid themselves in their terror so that not one of them was seen again that night. As for ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts

... propelled with poles, in the management of which the Canadians show great dexterity. Their simultaneous motions were strongly contrasted with the awkward confusion of the inexperienced Englishmen, defended by the torrent, who sustained the blame ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin

... irresistible desire to laugh shone in her eyes, passed like a slight shiver over her delicate cheeks, made her upper lip curl and her nostrils dilate, and at last a clear, bright burst of mirth came from her lips, a torrent of gayety which was lively and sonorous as the song of a bird. She repeated, with little mischievous exclamations which issued from between her white teeth, and hurt Parent as much as a bite would have done: "Ha!... ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant

... next moment we were standing in a vast vault stretching out as far as our feeble light would show us, while about fifty feet to our left, in one black, gloomy, unbroken torrent, fell from some great height above, a cascade of water, black as night, till it reached the basin below us, which, even with our trembling lights, shone forth ...
— The Golden Magnet • George Manville Fenn

... for a couple of children, who, starting to run across the road, doubled back like rabbits. Miss Herron caught just a glimpse of their white faces, and the end of their father's torrent of imprecation. Now it was the horse of a baker's wagon that climbed the bank by the roadside in two leaps and pranced shiveringly. Some boys cheered and then ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various

... questioner did. The lad would seem to suppose, that his cousin's strong interest in their domestic ways of going on was all on account of Madame Babette. At last he worked his cousin up to the point of making him a confidant: and then the boy was half frightened at the torrent of vehement words he had unloosed. The lava came down with a greater rush for having been pent up so long. Morin cried out his words in a hoarse, passionate voice, clenched his teeth, his fingers, and seemed almost convulsed, as he spoke out his terrible love for Virginie, ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell

... melodious power, As have our cataracts, Pouring the iron facts, The giant acts Of these: such song as have our rock-ridged deep And mountain steeps, When winds, like clanging eagles, sweep the storm On tossing wood and farm: Such eloquence as in the torrent leaps,— Where the hoarse canyon sleeps, Holding the heart with its terrific charm, Carrying its roaring message to the town,— To voice their ...
— An Ode • Madison J. Cawein

... action was carried on at a distance. The Britons, armed with long swords and short targets, [120] with steadiness and dexterity avoided or struck down our missile weapons, and at the same time poured in a torrent of their own. Agricola then encouraged three Batavian and two Tungrian [121] cohorts to fall in and come to close quarters; a method of fighting familiar to these veteran soldiers, but embarrassing to the enemy from the nature of their armor; for the enormous British swords, blunt at the point, ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus

... the young man, overpowered with the feelings of a sympathising and generous nature, forgetting for a while Catherine's weakness, poured forth a torrent of inquiries, regrets, and self-upbraidings, which Catherine at first little heeded. But the name of her children, repeated again and again, struck upon that chord which, in a woman's heart, is the last ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... now—" I began, seeking to stop him, feeling as though I was face to face with a madman. But he instantly overbore me with his torrent that had ...
— The Willows • Algernon Blackwood

... instant the oncoming breaker descended with a rush from behind—a torrent of water washed the floe. Ootah was lifted from his feet and dashed against the sled. When he rose he waited in silence for an attack. There was none. He moved over the floe cautiously, feeling the ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre

... taken from the Shoshone villages, it would be necessary to descend the Lemhi to Salmon River; the Salmon would conduct them to the Snake, and that to the Columbia. But they were told that this course was impracticable. The Lemhi flowed in an ungovernable torrent through wild canyons which the hardiest adventurers from this tribe had never succeeded in passing. The description given by the Indians of the land route over the mountains was hardly more reassuring. ...
— Lewis and Clark - Meriwether Lewis and William Clark • William R. Lighton

... pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue: but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently: for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it offends me to the soul, to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who, for the ...
— Hamlet, Prince of Denmark • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]

... arrives in a long, serviceable-looking boat, with a wild, handsome, dark-haired son, and a silent, solemn old man for his crew. He himself is lean, wrinkled, hungry-looking; his eyes are restless with excitement, and his tongue overwhelms us with a torrent of words, spoken in a strange accent, but singularly free from provincialisms and bad grammar. He informs us that we must have been set to the northward in the night by a current, and goes on to acquaint us with so many ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins

... squadrons, and the hearts of the French horseman failed them. Discharging their carbines at an idle distance, they wheeled round and spurred from the field, leaving the nine infantry battalions of their comrades to be ridden down by the torrent of the allied cavalry. The battle was now won. Tallard and Marsin, severed from each other, thought only of retreat. Tallard drew up the squadrons of horse which he had left in a line extended towards Blenheim, and sent orders to ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.

... and sick, but staggered to his feet directly, roused by the loud shouts of the men who were tearing up the street, and screaming to those ahead to clear the way. He was conscious of a torrent of people rushing quickly by—looking up, could discern the cabriolet whirled along the foot-pavement with frightful rapidity—then heard a loud cry, the smashing of some heavy body, and the breaking of glass—and ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens

... thence passed Deloraine, To ancient Riddell's fair domain, Where Aill, from mountains freed, Down from the lakes did raving come; Each wave was crested with tawny foam, Like the mane of a chestnut steed, In vain! no torrent, deep or broad, Might bar the bold moss-trooper's road; At the first plunge the horse sunk low, And the water broke o'er ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang

... Purna took his way Till India's fields and plains were lost to view, Then through the rugged foot-hills upward climbed, And up a gorge by rocky ramparts walled, Through which a mighty torrent thundered down, Their treacherous way along the torrent's brink, Or up the giddy cliffs where one false step Would plunge them headlong in the raging stream, Passing from cliff to cliff, their bridge of ropes Swung high ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles

... and looked over the edge of the sheer descent where the road ended. A broad torrent foamed along fifty feet below. The side of the precipice fell away to the stream as smooth as a wall. It rose above them just as smooth. No way up or down. They saw ...
— Jack Haydon's Quest • John Finnemore

... bewildered by the eloquence and gestures of Saint-Aignan, made a thousand efforts to stem this torrent of words, of which, by the by, he did not understand a single one; he remained upright and motionless on his seat, and that was all he could do. Saint-Aignan continued, and gave a new inflection to his voice, and an increasing vehemence to his gesture: "As for the ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... arms are up— She screams—she cannot move for joy; She darts, as with a torrent's force, She almost has o'erturned the Horse, 375 And fast ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight

... extraordinary powers of self-control now gave way at last. At the first words of the unexpected charge against her she struck her hands together violently, gnashed her sharp white teeth, and burst out with a torrent of fierce-sounding words in some foreign language, the meaning of which I did not understand then and cannot ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins

... confounded by her vehemence. What argument had he to oppose to this torrent of bitter words? Or how reason with such a woman as this—one with a show of right, too, on her side, as he was bound to own? He did not attempt it, but gave up the point at once, turning ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter

... (as far as truth, reason and justice are capable of opposing) by the famous Mr. Molineux,[22] an English gentleman born here, as well as by several of the greatest patriots, and best Whigs in England; but the love and torrent of power prevailed. Indeed the arguments on both sides were invincible. For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery: But in fact, eleven ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift

... explanations to John. He must first see old Peter Fae and withdraw himself from his service. He found him busy in loading a small vessel with smoked geese and kippered fish, and he was apparently in a very great passion. Before John could mention his own matters, Peter burst into a torrent of invectives against another of his sailors, who, he said, had given some information to the Excise which had cost him a whole cargo of Dutch specialties. The culprit was leaning against a hogshead, and was listening to Peter's ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... has happened, and we have survived it pretty well. The Democratic Almanacs predicted a torrent, a whirlwind, and we know not what meteoric phenomena,—but the next day Nature gave no sign, the dome of the State-House was in its place, the Monument was as plumb as ever, no chimney mourned a ravished brick, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various

... the decoration of their palaces and chapels; and their antique splendor was rivalled or surpassed by the sudden opulence of the papal families. In Rome the voice of freedom and discord is no longer heard; and, instead of the foaming torrent, a smooth and stagnant lake reflects the image of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon

... carried off his hat and beat fiercely against his head, sweeping the long hair over his face. Again and again the current wheeled his boat around, drifting it back with a force he could not resist, sometimes close to the shore, sometimes out in the torrent of waters. It was impossible now to see his course, except by the lightning. The entire darkness baffled him ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens

... merely stood still. He said nothing. He had not the trained will of the older men that forced them into action in defiance of all emotional stress. He watched them moving as behind a glass that half destroyed their reality; it was dreamlike; perverted. Yet, through the torrent of Hank's meaningless phrases, he remembers hearing his uncle's tone of authority—hard and forced—saying several things about food and warmth, blankets, whisky and the rest ... and, further, that whiffs of that penetrating, unaccustomed ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood

... knees before Durand, suffered the torrent of abuse meekly. He was a scoundrel, hired to do murder; and his vilification by an angered employer did not greatly trouble him, particularly since he understood little ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson

... now remaining to him were the Montagnais. In their camp on the Richelieu, one of them dreamed that a war party of Iroquois was close upon them; on which, in a torrent of rain, they left their huts, paddled in dismay to the islands above the Lake of St. Peter, and hid themselves all night in the rushes. In the morning they took heart, emerged from their hiding-places, descended to Quebec, and went thence to Tadousac, ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Volume I. - Voyages Of Discovery And Early Explorations: 1000 A.D.-1682 • Various

... persuaded that between arresting him and scaling Heaven there is no difference. As may well be imagined, such astounding remarks were not uttered without interruption, and warm altercations from the Cardinal de Bissy, who, nevertheless, could not stop the torrent. At last, carried away by anger and vexation, Bissy seized the Marechal by the arm and the shoulder, and hurried him to the door, which he opened, and then pushed him out, and followed at his heels. Dubois, more dead than alive, followed also, as well as he could—he was obliged to ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... feeling of helplessness in it. This powerlessness in the presence of elemental forces was heightened by the deluge of water. There had been an immense fall of snow the winter before, the Merced was a raging torrent, overflowing its banks, and from every ledge ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner

... to walk, almost to run, around the tent. He was like a wild animal seeking an outlet. Was he to throw up the work which he had undertaken? Was he, the frail obstacle self-set against the torrent, to be vanquished in his turn? Oh, how gladly he would have given his own life! He became aware of this, deep down in his inner consciousness. And he understood, as it were physically, the sacrifice of those who go to their ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc

... then, at least, traversed rising ground from which most of the melting snow had drained away. Now, however, as they approached the more level littoral there were wide tracts of mire and swamp to be painfully floundered through, while every ravine and hollow was swept by a frothing torrent, and they had often to search for hours for a place where it was possible to cross. To make things worse, they were drenched with bitter rain half the time, and trails of dingy mist obscured their path, but they toiled on stubbornly through ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss

... to hear this. He told Lucy, after dinner, that the brook looked magnificently in a freshet; that the banks were brimming full, and the water poured along in a great torrent, foaming and dashing against the logs ...
— Rollo at Play - Safe Amusements • Jacob Abbott

... resting, but he said nothing, and though he knew the necessity of speed, it was he who made the halts for the sake of his companion. Three hours after noon he took some food out of the bundle and made her eat. They had already drunk from a little torrent rushing out of a crack in the cliff wall, but even so the food seemed dry and she could scarcely swallow it. Anxiety had her in its grip, the cliffs stretching on and on interminably seemed like ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole

... are such ponderous bodies, do nevertheless rise above our heads, and remain a long while hanging there. Do you see those clouds that fly, as it were, on the wings of the winds? If they should fall, on a sudden, in watery pillars, rapid like a torrent, they would drown and destroy everything where they should happen to fall, and the other grounds would remain dry. What hand keeps them in those pendulous reservatories, and permits them to fall only by drops as if they distilled through a gardener's ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon

... edge of the chasm, the chasm being at this point about twenty feet in width—twenty feet in width, and even here, where it was two thousand feet less in depth than it was a mile higher up, at least eight thousand feet in descent—sheer to the raging torrent and the huge, jagged lava-bowlders below. It was all done so quickly that none of the party had time to become alarmed. Peters, whose arms when he hung them reached to within four inches of his feet, stooped just enough to bring his hands to the ground. Then, as a lame man using crutches ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake

... that the man laboured under an excitement of being, which had little or nothing to do with religious sincerity. It was merely his physical fury, dammed back from a more natural channel, which had caused this exaltation of mind. She watched him with a mocking smile as he poured forth a torrent of vehement words—denunciations of all things joyful, exhortations to repentance, and thunders of prospective vengeance on sin. Even to her the sermon seemed a masterpiece of eloquence, and the artistic feeling in her rejoiced in the vigorous phrases and fervid ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay

... of his grief. He was not dangerously, ill, but they feared many days for his reason; and it required all the kind solicitude of the director of the college, combined with the most skillful medical aid, to stem the torrent of his sorrow, and to turn it gradually into a calmer channel, until by degrees the mourner recovered both health and reason. His youthful spirits, however, had received a blow from which they never rebounded, and one thought lay ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various

... their arms, as though some invisible power had moved them both, and flew to meet each other. There was no doubt nor pause; and I plainly perceived that they were borne along as flowers are in a raging torrent; albeit she, or ever she reached him; was overcome by maiden shamefacedness, and her arms fell and her head was bent. But the little bird had ventured too far into the springe, and the fowler was not the man to let it escape; ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... trial," was ringing in the young minister's mind as he rose to speak to them. His sermon was a very quiet, practical one; a sermon that sought to bring religion before them as a matter of every-day life. It was altogether different from the torrent of speech that usually flowed from that pulpit. The people grew restless under this spiritual reserve. They wanted something to sanction, something to shout for, and here was this man talking to them as simply and quietly as if ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar

... when she distinguished her voice, and Maria stood close to it, scarcely daring to respire, lest a modulation should escape her, so exquisitely sweet, so passionately wild. She began with sympathy to pourtray to herself another victim, when the lovely warbler flew, as it were, from the spray, and a torrent of unconnected exclamations and questions burst from her, interrupted by fits of laughter, so horrid, that Maria shut the door, and, turning her eyes up to ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft

... We often see a torrent of muddy water, full of clay in suspension, covered with great streaks and masses of foam. On this fundamental foam, so to call it, which is soiled with earthy matters, we see here and there masses of a beautiful white foam, in which the bubbles ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre

... Mr. George; "the village of Meyringen. This waterfall comes down out of the mountain just back of the village; and they have had to build up an immense wall, a quarter of a mile long and twenty or thirty feet high, to keep the torrent of mud and sand out of the streets. Once it broke through and filled up the church four feet deep all over the floor with mud, and gravel, and stones. Some of the stones were ...
— Rollo in Switzerland • Jacob Abbott

... three months Dinah was acclimatized; she had reveled in the music at the Italian opera; she knew the pieces "on" at all theatres, and the actors and jests of the day; she had become inured to this life of perpetual excitement, this rapid torrent in which everything is forgotten. She no longer craned her neck or stood with her nose in the air, like an image of Amazement, at the constant surprises that Paris has for a stranger. She had learned to breathe that witty, vitalizing, teeming atmosphere where clever people ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac

... cake, with Jule on it, heaving up and down with the mighty rhythmic motion of the surging torrent; and all ran along down the banks, to come nearer. The boy stood in the very jaws of death. Beneath, the cataract roared and hurled ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 4, January 26, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various

... Juliette well protected in their midst, had not joined the general onrush as yet. The crowd in the open place was still very thick, the outward-branching streets were very narrow: through these the multitude, scampering, hurrying, scurrying, like a human torrent let out of a whirlpool, rushed down headlong ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... Turnbull with a sort of rollicking self-exaggeration, very unusual with him, "France, which is one torrent of splendid scepticism from ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton

... through thy young veins. Ah, happy thou! whose seeking gains All that thou lovest, man disdains A sympathy in joys and pains With dwellers in the long, green lanes, With wings that shady groves explore, With watchers at the torrent's roar, And waders by the reedy shore; For thou, through purity of mind, Dost hear, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various

... cleft from top to bottom, spreads apart. The path lies in this breach, between two gigantic walls. A roaring torrent flows through the gorge. The air is icy, the granite looks black, and high above one the glimpse of blue sky ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant

... wind raging so that it seemed Buck must be blown off his feet, or the girl torn from the saddle and borne far out like a thistledown. With frightened eyes, which she strove vainly to keep closed, she saw long, broken slopes; occasionally when the air cleared, a frothing torrent; and once, at the end of a couple of hours, far down in a distant level land, a growth of giant timber. She thought that King was making his way down there. But his purpose soon became plain even to her; he was keeping high on the ridges, going about the head of the ravine ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory

... those who resist, and who wish to oppose themselves as a dyke against the torrent of the progress of higher humanity among the German people. Why should vast whole masses bow beneath the yoke of a perverse minority? And why, scarcely healed, should we fall back into a worse disease than that which we are ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - KARL-LUDWIG SAND—1819 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE

... told of a Chinaman crossing a suspension footbridge, high over a winter torrent, from one part of a mining camp to another. An Indian ran to meet him. John Chinaman started back as quickly as he could on the swaying bridge. The faster Indian caught him, and, though miners on both shores sought to save ...
— Down the Mother Lode • Vivia Hemphill

... was the mark of a clown."[1] So great was the influence of Piers Plowman, that from it were taken watchwords at the great rising of the peasants.[2] The power of such works could not be wholly hemmed in by the barrier of manuscript: like a spring torrent it would burst forth and carry all before it. In the manuscript period a book of great originality and power, or a work which reproduced the thought of the time accurately and with spirit, ran no great risk of being passed over and forgotten; too ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage

... the imagination and senses of the traveller. After wandering many days over dry, and stony, and desert places, where the lip thirsted for the stream, is it not delicious to sit at the brink of a wild, impetuous torrent, to gaze on its white foam and breaking waves, till you can almost feel their gush in every nerve and fibre, and can bathe your very soul in them. And while you slowly smoke your pipe of purest tobacco, ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers

... no fire like passion, there is no shark like hatred, there is no snare like folly, there is no torrent like greed. ...
— The Dhammapada • Unknown

... fury of the vine, rushing down Like a many-visaged torrent, with ivy-rod and thyrse, And many a wild and foaming crown of roses, Crowded the Bacchanals, the brown-limbed shepherds, The red-tongued leopards, and the glory of the god! Iacchus! Iacchus! without dance, ...
— The Lord of Misrule - And Other Poems • Alfred Noyes

... I pronounce it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus; but use all gently: for in the very torrent, tempest, and—as I may say—whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance, that may give ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee

... Kaiser's ranks, and of hastening the day when, with weakened numbers, Germany could no longer resist the onslaught of the armies of France and Britain and Belgium. Here, then, in front of Verdun, the French had but a mere handful in their first-line trenches—a mere handful—upon whom that torrent of shells was rained. Just a scattered, yet noble band, ready to hold up the assault which ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton

... used to propitiate superior powers; but our knowledge of the magical rites exercised by certain oriental nations, the Jews only excepted, is extremely limited. All the books professedly written on the subject, have been, swept away by the torrent of time. We learn, however, that the professors among the Chaldeans were generally divided into three classes; the Ascaphim, or charmers, whose office it was to remove present, and to avert future contingent evils; to ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian

... small fishes all ready cooked. What a quantity there were to be sure! The whole road was covered with them, and the banks on each side were beginning to disappear. Father Grumbler felt quite frightened at the torrent, but at last he remembered what the Holy Man had told him, and cried at the top of his voice: 'Enough! enough! That will do for to-day!' And the lid of the basket closed ...
— The Brown Fairy Book • Andrew Lang

... not going? You are not going!" Matrena had already set herself to protest with all the strenuous torrent of words in her poor desolated heart, when a glance from the reporter ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux

... their guns compass &c. under a shelving rock on the upper side of the rivene where they were perfectly secure from the rain. the first shower was moderate accompanyed by a violent rain the effects of which they did but little feel; soon after a most violent torrent of rain decended accompanyed with hail; the rain appeared to decend in a body and instantly collected in the rivene and came down in a roling torrent with irrisistable force driving rocks mud and everything before it which opposed it's passage, Capt. C. fortunately discovered it a moment before ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al

... rose with a gesture of impatience, walked to her window and gazed on the torrent of humanity pouring through Twenty-third Street from the beehives of industry that have changed this quarter of New York so rapidly in the last five years. She turned suddenly and confronted ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon

... had gone the marquis fell into a torrent of self-exculpation and cried for mercy. The three armed men drew near and urged him to confess for the good of his soul. They seemed to have no malice against him, but to feel that they must obey the orders given them. At the frantic ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr

... of the diner, nearly suffocated before being dragged out of his berth, was making vain effort to shove a way back into the blazing car, crying that all his money was under that pillow. But it was impossible to stem the torrent of ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King

... mule with patient tread Had moved along the plain, Now o'er the lava's ashen bed, Now through the sprouting grain, Across the torrent's rocky lair, Beneath the aloe-hedge, Where yellow broom makes sweet the air, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various

... Ellisville but far to the north and west. The skin-hunters had wiped out the last of the great herds of the buffalo. The face of Nature was changing. The tremendous drama of the West was going on in all its giant action. This torrent of rude life, against which the hands of the law were still so weak and unavailing, had set for it in the ways of things a limit for its flood and a ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough

... arm shall bring to ruin, swift and low! Even now my bolts are aimed, my storm-clouds lower, And I will arm my people with a faith, Shall make them free of fear, and free of scaith; Arid they shall bear from me a smiting sword, Edged with keen lightning, at whose stroke is poured A torrent of destruction and swift wrath, Sweeping—the insolent legions from their path! The usurper shall be taught that none shall take— The right to punish and avenge from me: And I will guard my City by the Sea, And save its people for their ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various

... Europe caused probably by dissensions among their chiefs, and also by their arms being employed in attack upon the Scandinavian nations. But when Attila (or Atzel, as he is called in the Hungarian language) became their ruler, the torrent of their arms was directed with augmented terrors upon the west and the south; and their myriads marched beneath the guidance of one master-mind to the overthrow both of the new and the old powers ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.

... deceive the lurking bands of savages, he and two companions left the fort he had built on the bank of the Mississippi, and came through the wilderness to Harrodsburg. They lived on the buffaloes they shot, and when they came to the Tennessee River, which was then in flood, they crossed the swift torrent on a raft of logs bound together with grapevines. At Harrodsburg they found the land court open, and thronged with an eager, jostling crowd of settlers and speculators, who were waiting to enter lands in the surveyor's office. Even the dread of the Indians could not overcome ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt

... bruited through the squadrons of the Moor; Who had that notion of their love conceived From signs of kindness witnessed evermore. For — good or bad — though from one mouth it flows, Fame to a boundless torrent quickly grows. ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto

... cauldron came whistling through the kitchen window in a blizzard of flying glass and buried itself, edgewise, in the wall over the stove. Hetty slammed backwards headfirst into a heap of shattered eggs. A torrent of broken plaster, and crockery fragments rained on her stunned figure. Through dazed eyes, she saw a column of purple-reddish fire rising ...
— Make Mine Homogenized • Rick Raphael

... Thy power hath bless'd me, sure it still Will lead me on, O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till The night is gone, And with the morn those angel faces smile Which I have loved ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth

... the chief town of the department. It was partly for this reason that Monsieur Joseph, who valued privacy and independence, left it in its present break-neck condition, more like the dry course of a torrent ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price

... moved her hold from the dagger, and drew the weapon from the wound. A torrent of blood flowed over his vest, and stained the hand that grasped hers. She turned of a deadly paleness, but a demoniac joy still ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter

... might have spared herself the trouble of pouring out this torrent of questions. The last was really the ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce

... principal mark. His face was narrow, long and aquiline; his health uneven. It was evidently his soul which made men quickly forget the ill-matched case which bore it; for almost alone of the great poets he was consistently happy, and there poured out from him not only this unceasing torrent of verse, but also advice, sustenance, and a kind of ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc

... fainted when she heard the alarm—a piece of news which added to my anxiety. We called up the dowager countess, Comyn's mother, and Carlisle broke the news to her, mercifully lightening me of a share of the blame. Her Ladyship received the tidings with great fortitude; and instead of the torrent of reproaches I looked for, and deserved, she implored me to go home and care for my injuries lest I get the fever. I believe ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... them. If you attempt to practise upon them that common vice of English mistresses, to scold them for any slight omission or offence, you rouse into active operation all their new-found spirit of freedom and opposition. They turn upon you with a torrent of abuse; they demand their wages, and declare their intention of quitting you instantly. The more inconvenient the time for you, the more bitter become their insulting remarks. They tell you, with a high hand, that "they are as good as you; that they can get twenty better places by the morrow, ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie

... thunder of the avalanche burst on our ears. In countries whose features are of less magnitude, nature betrays her living powers in the foliage of the trees, in the growth of herbage, in the soft purling of meandering streams; here, endowed with giant attributes, the torrent, the thunder-storm, and the flow of massive waters, display her activity. Such the church-yard, such the requiem, such the eternal congregation, that waited on ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley

... in the House of Commons, finding the torrent against them not to be stemmed, suspended their opposition; by which means an address was voted, nemine contradicente, to acknowledge Her Majesty's condescension, to express their satisfaction in what she had already done, and to desire she would please to ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. X. • Jonathan Swift

... In the mad rush of her ideas one sentence detached itself from the torrent. "He knows well enough what's the ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair

... gainsaid; Come to the house. Ho, there; set close at hand Vats of pure water, that the guests may stand At the altar's verge, where falls the holy spray." Then quickly spake Orestes: "By the way We cleansed us in a torrent stream. We need No purifying here. But if indeed Strangers may share thy worship, here are we Ready, O King, ...
— The Electra of Euripides • Euripides

... — " a torrent of bad language from Monsieur Deschamps, and a howl of execration from all ...
— In the Quarter • Robert W. Chambers

... through diaphanous air. No contrast more admirable than the alternation of iron upland whereupon hardly a blade of grass may grow and the Wady with its double avenue of leek-green tamarisks, hedging now a furious rain-torrent then a ribbon of purest sand, or the purple-gray shadow rising majestic in the Orient to face the mysterious Zodiacal Light, a white pyramid whose base is Amenti—region of resting Osiris—and whose apex pierces the zenith. ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... to Hand.—When many things have to be conveyed across a piece of abominably bad road—as over sand-dunes, heavy shingle, mud of two feet deep, a morass, a jagged mountain tract, or over stepping-stones in the bed of a rushing torrent—it is a great waste of labour to make laden men travel to and fro with loads on their backs. It is a severe exertion to walk at all under these circumstances, letting along the labour of also carrying a burden. The men should be stationed in a line, each ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton

... had been loath to leave the sufferer. He still stood by the open door to call to the first passer-by. Now, shudderingly wishful to stem the torrent of blasphemies, innocent though ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson

... far from its native soil, it is not credible that all the solid shed antlers of such species of deer could be carried by the same cause to the same distance; or that any of them could be rolled for a short distance, with other heavy debris of a mighty torrent, without fracture and signs of friction. But the shed antlers of the large extinct species of deer found in this island and in Ireland have commonly their parts or branches entire as when they fell; and the fractured specimens are generally found ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller

... Sackvilles, and of the Queen's consanguinity, or as the people then called him FILL- SACKS, by reason of his great wealth, and the vast patrimony left to his son, whereof in his youth he spent the best part, until the Queen, by her frequent admonitions, diverted the torrent of his profusion; he was a very fine gentleman, of person and endowments, both of art and nature, but without measure magnificent, till on the turn of his honour, and the alloy, that his yearly good counsel had wrought upon those immoderate ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton

... bottom, and he bobbed up like a cork. Again he clutched the tree, and on the two went a distance of ten feet further. But now the tree became jammed between two other rocks, and there it stuck, with Sam clutching one end and the water rushing in, a torrent over the other. ...
— The Rover Boys at School • Arthur M. Winfield

... that light shall glow On Linden's hills of stained snow, And bloodier yet the torrent ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt

... Lad was a motion of the bow; but the motion was effective, for it sent a torrent of notes into the air, which thrilled through the body and tingled along the nerves like successive electric shocks. The old Trapper fairly bounded into the air; and when he struck the floor his feet were flying. Nor was he alone; the jig had started a dozen on the instant; and the floor ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray

... pictures of the misgovernment of France. But Charles's own spirits are so high and so amiable, and he is so thoroughly convinced his cousin is a fine fellow, that one's scruples are carried away in the torrent of his happiness and gratitude. And his would be a sordid spirit who would not clap hands at the consummation (Nov. 1440); when Charles, after having sworn on the Sacrament that he would never again bear arms against England, and pledged himself body and soul to the unpatriotic faction ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Neptune himself struck the earth with his trident and let the flood enter. Then the waters streamed over the open meadows, covered the fields, dislodged trees, temples and houses. Wherever a palace stood, its gables were soon covered with water and the highest turrets were hidden in the torrent. Sea and earth were no longer divided; all was ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various

... slender marge Divides the Italian peasant from the Gaul. Then winter gave him strength, and fraught with rain The third day's crescent moon; while Eastern winds Thawed from the Alpine slopes the yielding snow. The cavalry first form across the stream ' To break the torrent's force; the rest with ease Beneath their shelter gain the further bank. When Csesar crossed and trod beneath his feet The soil of Italy's forbidden fields, "Here," spake he, "peace, here broken laws be left; Farewell to treaties. Fortune, lead me on; War is our judge, ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan

... well enough what was coming, but she had her own way, and at the instant that she again poured down upon my mouth and face a plenteous discharge, her own rosy mouth received a torrent ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous

... of a sudden flung open. In the space of a few years something like five centuries poured over the land. Nikola stood on the rocks with his sons hoping to escape the devastating torrent. But there was no way of escape. They must swim with ...
— Twenty Years Of Balkan Tangle • Durham M. Edith

... variously and distinctly marked, is that of travel. The descent down the sides of the Pit, and the ascent of the Sacred Mountain, show one familiar with such scenes—one who had climbed painfully in perilous passes, and grown dizzy on the brink of narrow ledges over sea or torrent. It is scenery from the gorges of the Alps and Apennines, or the terraces and precipices of the Riviera. Local reminiscences abound. The severed rocks of the Adige Valley—the waterfall of St. Benedetto; the crags of Pietra-pana and St. Leo, which ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... quantity of lava and ashes ejected. Earthquakes are not unfrequent. The greatest mountain group is the Vatna or Klofa Yokul, on the south coast, a mass of snow and ice covering many hundred square miles, and sending down prodigious glaciers which almost reach the sea. From one of these a torrent issues, little more than a hundred yards long, and a mile and a half broad. The line of perpetual snow ranges from 2,000 to 3,000 feet. The loftiest summits of this great mountain mass have never been ascended, but the highest ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries - of the English Nation, v. 1, Northern Europe • Richard Hakluyt

... Offence, The Sound must seem an Eccho to the Sense. Soft is the Strain when Zephyr gently blows, And the smooth Stream in smoother Numbers flows; But when loud Surges lash the sounding Shore, The hoarse rough Verse shou'd like the Torrent roar. When Ajax strives some Rocks vast Weight to throw, The Line too labours, and the Words move slow; Not so, when swift Camilla scours the Plain, Flies o'er th' unbending Corn, and skims along ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... river could turn into a wild and savage torrent, either, a few hundred yards along, if you had nothing to judge it by but this quiet stretch," he returned. "But listen to it down ...
— Claim Number One • George W. (George Washington) Ogden

... you don't realise the amount of observation I bring to bear on such an event—the strange house, the unfamiliar food, the new inscrutable people—everything has to be observed, dealt with, if possible accounted for, and if unaccountable, then inflexibly faced and recollected. A torrent of impressions has poured in upon me—to say nothing of the anxious consideration beforehand of topics of conversation, and modes of investigation! To stay in a new house crushes me with fatigue—and even a little party like this, which seems, I daresay, to some of you, a negligible, even a tedious ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson

... and over the near ridges on the other side, the deluge was immense. A spray of thin vapour was thrown high above it, rising and falling, and blown into fantastic shapes. The speed of its course was like a mountain torrent. Here and there a few treetops were discovered and then whelmed again; and for one second, the bough of a dead pine beckoned out of the spray like the arm of a drowning man. But still the imagination was dissatisfied, ...
— The Sea Fogs • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the universe, as through a torrent pass all particular bodies, being all of the same nature, and all joint workers with the universe itself as in one of our bodies so many members among themselves. How many such as Chrysippus, how ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius

... gentleman, who is resolved to 'take his full change' out of Parker, and therefore to lose no time, commences operations in the very first words of his biography: 'Parker,' says he, 'the author of ——, was the spawn of Samuel Parker.' His rage will not wait for an opportunity; he throws off a torrent of fiery sparks in advance, and gives full notice to Parker that he will run his train right into him, if he can come up with his rear. This man is not malicious, but truculent; like the elder Scaliger, of whom it was observed that, having been an officer of cavalry up to ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey

... incredible. One sees at once how the old stage devices have departed from the libretto, and with them the fragmentary and jerky style of music; the intermittent inspiration of the Dutchman is replaced by an unchecked torrent of inspired music. All the little suggestions of Bellini and Donizetti are clean gone; the amorphous melody of the Dutchman is gone, or metamorphosed by being charged with energy, colour and meaning; every phrase has character, and communicates a very definite ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman

... woman! witch! devil! What does it all mean?" was the torrent of incoherence which next burst from Leslie, not affording Harding a very close solution of the mystery, but promising at ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford

... Sweyn landed at the mouth of the Humber and again swept over the land like a torrent, and the English, tired of obedience to kings who could not defend them, recognized him as king of the North. His son, Canute the Great, had to contend with a rival more worthy of him, (Edmund Ironside.) Returning from Denmark at the head of a considerable force, and aided by ...
— The Art of War • Baron Henri de Jomini

... Congo and a good view of the lowest cataract is obtained, the brown water dashing over the rocks and throwing up spray which is converted into brilliant jewels by the youthful sun not yet an hour old. Then turning sharply to the right, the train runs up the valley of the Posu, a mountain torrent which rushes and roars through a narrow defile. Snorting angrily, the engines climb up this steep gradient, cross the river by an iron bridge and then groaning under the brakes, slide down into another valley. The main direction however, is upwards, and as the ...
— A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State • Marcus Dorman

... life she and her mother had quarrelled; there had never been implanted in her even an idea of the common decency of filial respect, or of its semblance. Her mother's gusty, fitful temper had always, when roused, been given instant vent in a torrent of vituperation, and the girl, while too sulky to be so spontaneous even in the unpleasant sense of the word, had early acquired the habit of speaking to her mother as she would have to a ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten

... a trammelled torrent, Is changed her life's free flowing tide; Knows that her hand no oar is holding, With which her drifting bark ...
— Debris - Selections from Poems • Madge Morris

... the argument which began with a swirl of conjecture and ended, hours later, in a torrent of bitter personalities farthest of all from the first question under consideration, they avoided a mention of that regrettable incident just as for some time after its occurrence they avoided each other's ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans

... you money," cried he, frantic with rage, trying to push the silver into Chook's hand. And then Chook overwhelmed him with a torrent of words, swearing that he had taken the money and made a sale. The Chinaman hesitated ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone

... expedition. Mr. Carson accompanied him. Forty Mexicans and several Pueblo Indians joined the party under the command of Mr. James H. Quinn. Passing on in a northerly direction, they came to a small river emptying into the Rio del Norte. This was a wild mountain stream, swollen into a foaming torrent, by melting snows and recent rains. But it must be crossed. It was perilous, for the bed was ...
— Christopher Carson • John S. C. Abbott

... the torrent of words which he had expected to hear when he opened the door, complete silence reigned as he entered. The fat man in the chair by the fire was still leaning backward, but his tankard was now inverted above his head, and a glance showed that his companions at the ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye

... maligned him, and their torrent wrath In furious imprecations o'er him broke, He kept his counsel as he kept his path; 'T was for his race, not for himself he spoke. He knew the import of his Master's call, And felt himself too mighty to ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar

... which sustained his throne? And if he used violence, he inaugurated civil war, which would destroy thousands where revolution destroyed hundreds. Moreover, the example of Charles I. was before him. He dared not run the risk. In such a torrent of revolutionary forces, when even regular troops fraternized with citizens, that experiment was dangerous. And then he was tender-hearted, and shrank from shedding innocent blood. His queen, Marie Antoinette, the intrepid daughter of Maria Theresa, with her Austrian ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord

... immigrant class are preponderantly poor and of low social rank, that it should for two or three generations be looked upon as a church for the illiterate and unskilled laboring class. An incident of the excessive torrent rush of the immigration was that the Catholic Church became to a disproportionate extent an urban institution, making no adequate provision for the dispersed in ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon

... commencement. His father was offended, and poured out a confused torrent of Guy's imagined misdeeds, while Philip explained and modified ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge

... gate at the end of the one of the stands opened and the "Maroons," in their gaily colored jerseys, trotted on the field. The "Maroon" stands rose en masse and a torrent of cheers swept over the field as they gave the team a greeting that must have "warmed the ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield

... harrican deck," he would pitch him overboard. The next day Billy appeared whilst Aaron, off duty, was strolling up and down outside the pilot-house, and strolled offensively in his wake. Never a hostile glance or a word from Aaron. At last, tired of dumb show, Billy broke forth with a torrent of imprecation closing with "When are you going to pitch me off the boat, you blankety-blank ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson

... which had tasted blood. I saw the line at its farther end waver suddenly and toss to and fro. Then a hundred hands went up, and confused angry cries rose with them. The troopers struck about them, giving back slowly as they did so. But their efforts were in vain. With a scream of triumph a wild torrent of people broke through between them, leaving them stranded; and rushed in a headlong cataract towards the steps. Bezers was close to us at the time. "S'death!" he cried, swearing oaths which even his sovereign could scarce have equalled. "They will snatch him from ...
— The House of the Wolf - A Romance • Stanley Weyman

... called Thlakalamah, the chief whereof, who was a young and handsome man, was called Keasseno, and was a relative of our guide. The situation of this village is the most charming that can be, being built on the little river that we had ascended, and indeed at its navigable head, being here, but a torrent with numerous cascades leaping from rock to rock in their descent to the deep, limpid water, which then flows through a beautiful prairie, enamelled with odorous flowers of all colors, and studded with superb groves of oak. The freshness and beauty of this spot, which Nature seemed ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First American Settlement on the Pacific • Gabriel Franchere

... Still no word; on which, about 4 P.M., the Prussian batteries awaken again: volcanic torrent of red-hot shot and shells, for seven hours; still no word from Roth. About 11 at night his Majesty again sends a Drum (Parley Trumpet or whatever it is) to the Gate; formally summons Roth; asks him, 'If he has well considered what this can lead to? Especially what he, Roth, meant by firing ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... an idea of the vividness of the descriptions in these stories without making extracts which would be entirely too long. It is safe to say, however, that no one could possibly fail to be carried along by the torrent of fiery narration which marks these wonderful tales.... Never was the marvelous deviltry of the Jesuits so portrayed. Never were the horrors of war painted in more ...
— Life of Wagner - Biographies of Musicians • Louis Nohl

... on the tongue: but if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus; but use all gently: for in the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance, that ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson

... small states? How couldst thou have torn so mercilessly the noble passions and aspirations of being free and independent from the Boer hearts? Hast thou verily extinguished by force the highest and holiest ambitions of a free-born people? Can the mountain torrent rushing down the valley be stemmed in its onward course? If patriotism is the ideal of a race that nourishes the most indestructible of all passions, then ye have indeed contended against an indestructible element of the ...
— In the Shadow of Death • P. H. Kritzinger and R. D. McDonald

... seemed to annoy him as much as any of his more serious vexations. "What will become of me," said he, "if the English, who are cruising hereabout, should learn that I have landed in Corsica? I shall be forced to stay here. That I could never endure. I have a torrent of relations pouring upon me." His great reputation had certainly prodigiously augmented the number of his family. He was over whelmed with visits, congratulations, and requests. The whole town was in a commotion. Every one of its inhabitants ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, v3 • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne

... thing with which I had been unacquainted till now. As I say, while I appreciated the power of the terrific denunciation that swept out of Wolf Larsen's mouth, I was inexpressibly shocked. The scorching torrent was enough to wither the face of the corpse. I should not have been surprised if the wet black beard had frizzled and curled and flared up in smoke and flame. But the dead man was unconcerned. He continued to grin with a sardonic humour, with a cynical mockery ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London

... eruption, the volcano Skaptar-Joekull, on the mainland, on June 11th, 1783, threw out a torrent of lava, so immense as to surpass in magnitude the bulk of Mont Blanc, and ejected so vast an amount of fine dust, that the atmosphere over Iceland continued loaded with it for months afterwards. It fell in such quantities over parts of ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin

... of ignorant faith. The brief anticipatory announcement of the miracle puts stress on the arrest of the waters at the instant when the priests' feet touched them, and tells what is to befall the arrested torrent above the point where the ark stood, saying nothing about the lower stretch of the river, and just hinting by one word 'heap' the parallel between this miracle and that of the passing of the Red Sea: 'The floods stood upright as an heap' (Exod. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... further invaders; and Kent, east of the Medway, and the Isle of Wight may have been the next morsels they swallowed. These early comers were Jutes, but their easy success led to imitation by their more numerous southern neighbours, the Angles and Saxons; and the torrent of conquest grew in volume and rapidity. Invaders by sea naturally sailed or rowed up the rivers, and all conquerors master the plains before the hills, which are the home of lost causes and the refuge of native states. Their progress may be traced in the names of English kingdoms and shires: ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard

... excited, dizzy with success, Lottie was swept away by the torrent of mingled feelings. Her sorrow for her father's death was violent, but not lasting. She could not feel his loss for any length of time, she had always been so much more her mother's child. Even during her mourning there was something ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various

... Kloster, with a considerable slice of the mother's Geld. I told them we had no Klosters in Scotland, with a certain feeling of superiority. No more had they, I was told—"Hier ist unser Kloster!" and the speaker motioned with both arms round the taproom. Although the first torrent was exhausted, yet the Doctor came up again in all sorts of ways, and with or without occasion, throughout the whole interview; as, for example, when one man, taking his pipe out of his mouth and shaking his head, remarked apropos of nothing ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... sufficiently tragical? Not the first stroke he had got, we can surmise; but the first torrent of strokes, and open beating like a slave;—which to a proud young man and Prince, at such age, is indeed INtolerable. Wilhelmina knows too well what he meaus by "ending it in one way or another;" but strives to reassure Mamma as to its meaning "flight," or the like desperate resolution. "Mere ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... standing knee deep in a torrent that tore at our footing, while we hacked frantically with knives and axes at the slimy tentacles that reached up ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various

... attracted by the coolness of the water. He stood beneath the sonorous torrent and he thrilled with voluptuous shivers as he received on his back the force of the falling stream. A sensation of freshness overspread his body, causing him to sigh with pleasure. His limbs seemed to relax beneath ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... his life; involved in a cause that had for its object the independence of a nation; and that against the power of the mightiest kingdom in Europe. An hour earlier or later, an accident by the way, a swollen torrent, a chance impediment of any kind that should delay me—and what a change might that produce in the whole destiny of the world. The dispatches I carried conveyed instructions the most precise and accurate—the places for combined action of the two armies—information as to the actual state ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various

... Fatiguing and trying though the journey was, health was improved by it, and we were well rewarded for any toil and inconvenience we endured by the magnificent scenery we saw. Down the Pindaree valley came a roaring torrent, showing by its yellow tinge it came from the melted snow. We were awed as we looked up at the tremendous cliffs on either side. Pursuing our way in silence, I heard a servant from the plains, who was walking behind me, ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy

... does over the human face in a mirror. Soon the snow began to fall. Athwart the distant landscape it swept like a white mist. The storm-wind came from the Alsatian hills, and struck the dense clouds aslant through the air. And ever faster fell the snow, a roaring torrent from those mountainous clouds. The setting sun glared wildly from the summit of the hills, and sank like a burning ship at sea, wrecked in the tempest. Thus the evening set in; and winter stood at the gate wagging his white and ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... have married anyone who was fighting against my country. But you really did not do him any justice." Now that Polly was started she rushed along like a torrent in a storm. "He was brought up to think England right, and he knew nothing about the Colonies or the temper and the courage of the people. If you were taken to Russia when you were very little, and everybody was charming ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas

... to starboard, the water splashed over the railing, rushing like a torrent between the turrets; then the ship heeled over to the other side. The ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff

... wave waters a meadow of level turf; sometimes it is bounded by perpendicular rocks; pretty dwellings, with their gay porticos are seen, alternately with wild intervals of forest, where the tangled bear-brake plainly enough indicates what inhabitants are native there. Often a mountain torrent comes pouring its silver tribute to the stream, and were there occasionally a ruined abbey, or feudal castle, to mix the romance of real life with that of nature, the Ohio would ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope

... through the dusk we went, he guiding me now by a word telling me how to step, or now turning to give me his hand to help me up a steep place, over a large rock, or around a bad angle. For a time we had heard the roar of the torrent as it boiled below us, but as we ascended it had gradually hushed, and we at length were in a region of profound silence. The night was cloudy, and as dark as it ever is in midsummer in that far northern latitude; but I knew that we were climbing along the edge of a precipice, on a narrow ...
— Elsket - 1891 • Thomas Nelson Page

... been carried down the hill with the torrent of Wendovers, 'all the way from Norway. ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon

... M. Godefroy seemed to have a torrent of blood rushing through his head. He sprang at Mademoiselle, seized her by the arms and shook ...
— The Lost Child - 1894 • Francois Edouard Joachim Coppee

... break from a full heart; half rising, on an elbow, she placed her hand on Geoffrey's shoulder and drew his head in the bend of her wrist down close to her as she lay. Her lips almost brushed his cheek as she poured into his ear a torrent of words. "I am so miserable! so miserable!" was all he could distinguish. ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.

... six hundred feet more, the torrent leaps and foams through a trench it has cut out of the solid rock to the cliff, from which it takes a second plunge. This Lower Yosemite fall is four hundred feet high, the rushing waters turning into clouds of spray, which the wind tosses from side ...
— Stories of California • Ella M. Sexton

... anxiety for France. It has given place now to unstinted confidence and admiration. In their astonishment the British are apt to forget the impressive magnitude of their own effort, the millions of soldiers, the innumerable guns, the endless torrent of supplies that pour into France to avenge the little army of Mons. It seems natural to us that we should so exert ourselves under the circumstances. I suppose it is wonderful, but, as a sample Englishman, I do not feel that it is at all wonderful. I did ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells

... around it Threatening peaks, while stern seas bound it, With cold winters, summers bleak, Curtly smiling, never meek, 'Tis the giant we must master, Till he work our will the faster. He shall carry, though he clamor, He shall haul and saw and hammer, Turn to light the tumbling torrent,— All his din and rage abhorrent Shall, if we but do our duty, Win for us a realm ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson

... crisp, an almost tinkling sound. Down into the gorge, surnamed of Avalanche, our horses plunged; and there we lost the sunshine till we reached the Bear's Walk, opening upon the vales of Albula, and Julier, and Schyn. But up above, shone morning light upon fresh snow, and steep torrent-cloven slopes reddening with a hundred fading plants; now and then it caught the grey-green icicles that hung from cliffs where summer streams had dripped. There is no colour lovelier than the blue of an autumn ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds

... oh, dear!—he's dead, he's dead!" wailed Mary, taking the little fellow from Jupp and lifting him up in her arms, preparing to start off at a run for the vicarage, while the little girls burst into a torrent of tears. ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson

... air of returning home, and flattered them with the hope of getting once more to their native country, that circumstance rendered them blind to all its inconveniences, and made them adhere to it with insurmountable obstinacy. The captain was therefore obliged to give way to the torrent, though he never changed his opinion, and had, in appearance, to acquiesce in this resolution, though he gave it all the obstruction he could, particularly in regard to lengthening the long-boat, which he contrived should be of such a size, as, though it might carry them to ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr

... might. That they had already taken effect, he saw, as Matty, who had not spoken a word all this time, drew the beautiful, shining tresses in front of her, and passed her skinny little hands lovingly over them. Tony stood staring stupidly after him for a moment, then burst out at him with a torrent of abuse and threats which Theodore did not ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews

... righteous within its vast tent; a liberality similar to a cloud which waters at once the leaves that have fallen from the trees and the trees themselves; a courage which, even when the clouds shed torrents of rain, causes a torrent of blood to flow; a patience which never tires of hoping; a prudence which prevents his enemies from approaching his pastures; a resolution which puts their troops to flight before the action commences; ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various









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