"Ebb" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... never a flood goes shoreward now But lifts a keel we manned; There's never an ebb goes seaward now But drops our dead on the sand— But slinks our dead on the sands forlore, From The Ducies to the Swin. If blood be the price of admiralty, If blood be the price of admiralty, Lord God, we ...
— The Seven Seas • Rudyard Kipling
... and lashed himself into rage. Rage abated and became biting disappointment and unspeakable heaviness of heart. Again rage would be conjured up only to ebb again and to flood again as the ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... to be done with his existence? In the plenitude of youthful health and strength, was his life to ebb away, like an unreplenished stream, flowing into nothingness? His days became more and more wearisome; the hours hung more and more heavily upon his hands; the feet of time sounded with iron tramp in his ears, yet never appeared to ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... not try to swim in the crick where it's narrow, or in that deep hole by the end of the wharf, where the lobster car's moored. When the tide's comin' in or it's dead high water, the current's strong there. On the ebb it'll snake you out into the breakers sure as I'm settin' here tellin' you. The cove's all right and good and safe; but keep away from the ...
— The Woman-Haters • Joseph C. Lincoln
... addresses. Though unable to read, he quotes the Bible as one very familiar with that sacred book. He inherited a good memory, that serves him well in public address, and he is always happy and ready when it comes his turn to "speak in meeting." His messages are always notes of joy and gladness, and the ebb and flow of his voice in prayer often seem like the chanting of ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... roar with the dirges. 'T was the returning tide, that afar from the waste of the ocean, With the first dawn of the day, came heaving and hurrying landward. Then recommenced once more the stir and noise of embarking; And with the ebb of the tide the ships sailed out of the harbor, Leaving behind them the dead on the shore, ...
— The Children's Own Longfellow • Henry W. Longfellow
... To a certain extent the comparative excellence of his preparation turned out a disadvantage; the rigid training he had received enabled him to accomplish without effort what his fellow-students found difficult. Scholarship was at so low an ebb that the ability to scan Latin was looked upon as a high accomplishment; and he himself asserts that the class to which he belonged was the first in Yale College that had ever tried it. This may be questioned; but we need not feel any distrust of his declaration, ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... serene as the gathering of the sunrays to go down together; a perfect yet deepening peace was upon it. Cosmo scarcely left him, but watched and waited, with a cold spot at his heart, which kept growing bigger and bigger, as he saw his father slowly drifting out on the ebb-tide of this earthly life. Cosmo had now to go through that most painful experience of all—when the loved seem gradually withdrawing from human contact and human desires, their cares parting slowly farther and farther from the cares of those they leave—a gulf ever widening between, ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... you look!" he observed, half playfully,—"Religion must be at a very low ebb, if in a so-called Christian country you are surprised to hear a man openly acknowledge himself a ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... the Channel Fleet ships (considerably below full strength) had been rushed out of shore barracks, in which discipline had fallen to a terribly low ebb, to their unfamiliar shipboard stations, at the time of the Mediterranean scare. Beset by the flower of the German Navy, in ships manned by crews who lived afloat, it was asserted that the Channel Fleet had been annihilated, and ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... exchanged confidences more and more; and in the end the old lady began to speak without reserve about her past. It came about thus. After Christmas, Dave being culture-bound, and work of a profitable nature for the moment at a low ebb, Aunt M'riar had fallen back on some arrears of stocking-darning. Dolly was engaged on the object to which she gave lifelong attention, that of keeping her doll asleep. I do not fancy that Dolly was very inventive; but then, you may be, at three-and-a-half, seductive ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... all other free competition, as a rule, it inures enormously to the benefit of the body-whole. Exceptionally, however, it fails to do so, and behold disease. This struggle and turmoil is not only necessary to life—it is life. Out of the varying chances of its warfare is born that incessant ebb and flow of chemical change, that inability to reach an equilibrium, which we term "vitality." The course of life, like that of a flying express train, is not a perfectly straight line, but an oscillating ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... sometimes the Car of Progress stands still for a thousand years, else rolls slowly back toward brutishness, there being none of sufficient strength to advance the standards further up the rugged mountainside—nearer the Celestial City. Thus, ever in ebb and flow, gaining and losing, only to regain; nations rising and falling but to serve as stepping-stones whereon mount a nobler race, a grander people, the irrepressible conflict of the Godlike with the Beastlike ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... Apono, so called from a village of that name in the vicinity of Padua, where he was born in the year 1250, was an eminent philosopher, mathematician and astrologer, but especially excelled in physic. Finding that science at a low ebb in his native country, he resorted to Paris, where it especially flourished; and after a time returning home, exercised his art with extraordinary success, and by ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... implies a religious community more or less definitely organized—a situation which would suit post-exilic times, but hardly the exile; and this presumption is borne out by many other hints. The temple exists, lvi. 7, lx. 7, 13, but religion is at a low ebb. Fast days are kept in a mechanical spirit, and are marred by disgraceful conduct (lviii.). Judah suffers from raids, lxii. 8, Jerusalem is unhappy, lxv. 19, her walls are not yet built, lx, 10. The gloomy situation explains the passionate appeal of lxiii. 7-lxiv. to God ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... With my dear brother, as I do discern Him tempted, or a wand'ring from the way; Else as I should, I do not watch and pray. Pray then, and watch, be thou no drowsy sleeper, Grudge, nor refuse, to be thy brother's keeper, Seest thou thy brother's graces at an ebb? Is his heel taken in the spider's web? Pray for thy brother; if that will not do, To him, and warn him of the present woe That is upon him; if he shall thee hear Thou wilt a saviour unto ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... whilst a norther of equal pressure prevails at the Gulf-head, and vice versa. Suez, indeed, appears to be, in more ways than one, a hydrographical puzzle. When it is low water in and near the harbour, the flow is high between the Straits of Jobal and the Daedalus Light; and the ebb tide runs out about two points across the narrows, whilst the flood runs in on a line parallel with it. Finally, when we returned, hardly making headway against an angry norther, Suez, enjoying the "sweet south," was congratulating ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... be said to have flourished in England during the period of the great war, and architecture was certainly at a low ebb, but several eminent names belong to this period. Sir Thomas Lawrence was by far the foremost English portrait painter, and fitly represents the elegance of the regency, while Raeburn enjoyed an equal reputation in Scotland. ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... death. To interknit One's senses with so dense a breathing stuff Might seem a work of pain; so not enough Can I admire how crystal-smooth it felt, And buoyant round my limbs. At first I dwelt Whole days and days in sheer astonishment; Forgetful utterly of self-intent, Moving but with the mighty ebb and flow. Then like a new-fledged bird that first doth show His spreaded feathers to the morrow chill, I tried in fear the pinions of my will. 'Twas freedom! and at once I visited The ceaseless ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... called attention to a floating object which moved inside the mouth of the small, tidal creek that wandered through the marshy lowlands. In the shadowy light it could easily be mistaken for a log drifting down on the ebb of the tide. This was what the lads assumed it to be until they both noticed a behavior curious in a log. The long, low object turned athwart the current at the entrance of the creek and shot toward the nearest bank as ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... which time a large part were expended. But this gave us no kind of uneasiness, since we well knew that not the boat only, but the ship might be loaded in one tide almost, as they are dry at half ebb." ...
— The Life of Captain James Cook • Arthur Kitson
... setting when I came on the Idler's deck. There were plenty of bunks below. I did not need to go home. But I wanted to demonstrate to myself how much I was a man. There lay my skiff astern. The last of a strong ebb was running out in channel in the teeth of an ocean breeze of forty miles an hour. I could see the stiff whitecaps, and the suck and run of the current was plainly visible in the face and ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... was passenger in a little sloop, descending the river Delaware. There being no wind, we were obliged, when the ebb was spent, to cast anchor and wait for the next. The heat of the sun on the vessel was excessive, the company strangers to me, and not very agreeable. Near the river-side I saw what I took to be a pleasant green meadow, in the middle of ...
— From Boyhood to Manhood • William M. Thayer
... I had come to my studies in lower spirits than usual; the ebb was occasioned by a poignantly felt disappointment. Hannah had told me in the morning there was a letter for me, and when I went down to take it, almost certain that the long-looked for tidings were vouchsafed me at last, I found only an unimportant note from Mr. Briggs on ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... strange power the perception of beauty is! It seems to ebb and flow like some secret tide, independent alike of health or disease, of joy or sorrow. There are times in our lives when we seem to go singing on our way, and when the beauty of the world sits itself like a quiet harmony to the song we uplift. Then again come seasons when all is well ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... was rocking, and now she understood more fully her lover's trouble. Her courage slowly began to ebb. She fought against it, but slowly a terror of that dreadful hill crept up in her heart, and she longed to flee anywhere from it—anywhere but down into that caldron of fire below. But the thought was impossible. ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... had sailed out, dressed in our oilskins, and the skipper who, submerged to the waist, had pushed us off the shore through the breakers, had warned us to be back within two hours, for at that time the ebb-tide set in and, with the fresh north breeze, the strong current would make it difficult for us to land. My father had nodded as though he were thinking of something else and had long ago penetrated and computed the caprices of the ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... very foundation of the manifestation of life lies the principle of polarity, which expresses itself in the duality and unity of positive and negative affinity. The swaying to and fro of the positive and the negative, the desire to balance incomplete polarity, constitutes the very ebb and flow ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... and desperate effort of every physical and moral nerve to throw off the weight; and hence the heaviest anguish often precedes a return tide of joy and courage. So was it now with Tom. The atheistic taunts of his cruel master sunk his before dejected soul to the lowest ebb; and, though the hand of faith still held to the eternal rock, it was a numb, despairing grasp. Tom sat, like one stunned, at the fire. Suddenly everything around him seemed to fade, and a vision rose before him ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... barrier of man's brief life, and show its dark path, that seemed to bend no whither, to be an arc in an immeasurable circle of light and glory. The great river-courses which have shaped the lives of men have hardly changed; and those other streams, the life-currents that ebb and flow in human hearts, pulsate to the same great needs, the same great loves and terrors. As our thought follows close in the slow wake of the dawn, we are impressed with the broad sameness of the human lot, which never alters in the ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... in large swift Rivers, which ebb and flow; and are there plentifully to be found: As likewise Rocky and Weedy Rivers. But in the latter end of the Year he is to be found high up in the Country, in swift and violent Cataracts, coming ...
— The School of Recreation (1684 edition) • Robert Howlett
... And Carley's baser nature seemed in conflict with all that was noble in her. The victory did not yet go to either side. This was a bad hour for Carley. Her strength had about played out, and her spirit was at low ebb. ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... bludgeoning, stamping the life out. He would do it, by Heaven, he would do it! The memory of what had happened came fierily back, and made the pressing darkness burn. His wrath was brimming on the edge, ready to burst, and he felt proudly that it would no longer ebb in fear. Whisky had killed fear, and left a hysterical madman, all the more dangerous because he was so weak. Let his father try it on now; he ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... have shrunk in disgust. Their employers occasionally admitted them to their tables, and even to some degree of social intimacy. More frequently they presented them with their cast-off clothing, with new gowns for their wives at Christmas, or—when things were at a remarkably low ebb—with a hundredweight of flour or half a barrel of mess pork. Yet the recipients of these favours piqued themselves upon their good birth and high connexions, and would have felt themselves insulted if anyone had ventured to hint that they should visit, upon terms ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... smother griefe too secretly, May wast themselves in silent anguishment, And bring their bodies to so low an ebb, That all the world can never make it flowe, Unto the happy hight of former health. Then be not [so] iniurious to thy selfe, To wast thy strength in lamentation, But tell thy case; wele ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... of such things as Bourbon roses, rubies, and tropical midnights; her moods recalled lotus-eaters and the march in "Athalie"; her motions, the ebb and flow of the sea; her voice, the viola. In a dim light, and with a slight rearrangement of her hair, her general figure might have stood for that of either of the higher female deities. The new moon behind ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... the stretches of grass and flowers which shone in their midst, at the myriads of leaves upon the trees, the birds, the bees, and at the butterflies— winged blossoms hovering over duller hued plants—we thought how soon the tide of this joyous life around us would begin to ebb. Soon the frost would dull the grass, tint the leaves with rainbow hues and cause the flowers to fade. The birds would take wing and leave the place for warmer climes. Then, after the shroud of snow had been spread o'er the lifeless landscape, a new and fairer ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... possessions, our "treasure in heaven" that nothing can ever destroy. Life and Death may ebb and flow, and come and go; but we may, if we will, go on forever; or we may turn the other way and go down to death. Some day every human soul will elect, choose, and decide and then start on ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... Victorian Era art was at its lowest ebb. The young lady students of the period were copying those impossible lithographed heads which formed the stock-in-trade of the drawing-master, or those fashion-plate Venuses whose necks recalled the proportions of the giraffe, with ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... the "moments" for which she had come to Europe when she stood for the first time on the balcony overhanging the Corso, which Mrs. Ashe had hired in company with some acquaintances made at the hotel, and looked down at the ebb and surge of the just-begun Carnival. The narrow street seemed humming with people of all sorts and conditions. Some were masked; some were not. There were ladies and gentlemen in fashionable clothes, ...
— What Katy Did Next • Susan Coolidge
... Look'd up, appealing to the blue expanse, Where, in their calm, immortal beauty, shone Heaven's cloudless orbs. With faint and fainter moan, Bound on the shrine of sacrifice he lay, Till, drop by drop, life's current ebb'd away; Till rock and turf grew deeply, darkly red, And the pale moon gleam'd ...
— Home Pastimes; or Tableaux Vivants • James H. Head
... waits for the return of the tide when the tide is low, and when the shore is full, as all left shores are apt to be, of weeds and mire, and all corrupt and unclean things. Rutherford is never more helpful to his correspondents than when they consult him about their ebb tides, and find that he himself either has been, or still is, in the ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... fell Percy's blades, until the pea-pod was barely moving. The ebb, still running against the boat with undiminished strength, almost sufficed to hold her stationary. But, though the lad's muscles were relaxed and listless, a fierce battle was being fought out ...
— Jim Spurling, Fisherman - or Making Good • Albert Walter Tolman
... in a sudden fog and through the pilot's folly. We had struck upon a mud-bank, and driven into a perfect little pond, surrounded by banks and rocks and shoals of all kinds: the only safe speck in the place. Eased by this report, and the assurance that the tide was past the ebb, we turned in at three o'clock in the morning, to ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... the capital now lying idle will next year be in active employment, that which is this year unable to keep up with the demand will in its turn be locked up in crowded warehouses; and wages in these several departments will ebb and flow accordingly: but nothing can permanently alter general wages, except an increase or a diminution of capital itself (always meaning by the term, the funds of all sorts, destined for the payment of labor) compared with ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... for she was afraid of another invading hand; and blushing at the praise she could not disclaim ran away as soon as she was free. But as the tide of supper-time began to ebb, the doctor arrested Faith in her running about and saying that his sister had had no supper yet and wanted company, led her to the place his aunt had spoken of, a clear space at one end of the table, where the doctor also ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... in winter quarters. He divided it into small detachments, and for the sake of protecting and encouraging the loyalists, extended his line of communication for eighty miles. The fortunes of the insurgents were at low ebb. Not only were the loyalists strong in New Jersey, but crowds of the rebel party, many of them men of high standing, took advantage of the amnesty which Howe was empowered to offer. The Delaware would soon be frozen ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt
... this year, I am proud to see, Stands not as others stood; The prospects of posterity Are really rather good, Now that my zeal (not on the ebb) Has borne me ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 4, 1920 • Various
... ships got under way with the weather, or ebb, tide, a little before noon: latitude 8 deg. 52'. At four o'clock, the wind blew strong at south-east, with thick weather, and they anchored in 9 fathoms, blue mud; having made a course of E. N. E. nearly parallel to the coast. They remained here till the next afternoon; ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis • Matthew Flinders
... looks back with an eye of disgust. But they were the natural results of an age when religion was at the lowest ebb in Europe; when our travelled gentry only brought back with them that disregard of Christianity which they had learned in Paris and Rome, and when Voltaire's works were found on the toilet of every woman ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... far more furious than the one which burst on us soon after we landed. The sea came rushing into the river and drove back the ebb with a power which rapidly made the water rise; and as we watched it getting higher and higher, we began to fear that the whole of our peninsula would be flooded. Huge boughs were torn off the trees, which bent before ...
— Twice Lost • W.H.G. Kingston
... metropolis, may be remarked a tide of young men wending diurnal way to and from their respective desks and counters in the city, preceded by a ripple of errand-boys, and light porters, and followed by an ebb of plethoric elderly gentlemen in drab gaiters. Now these individuals compose—for the most part—that particular, yet indefinite class of people, who call themselves "gentlemen," and are called by everybody else "persons." They are a body—the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 2, 1841 • Various
... in Petersburg and London. Peace is evidently near. France and England are again beginning to negotiate; no Pitt now to be rigorous. The tide of War has been wavering at its summit for two years past; and now, with this of Russia, and this of Bute instead of Pitt, there is ebb everywhere, and all Europe determining for peace. Steady at the helm, as heretofore, a Friedrich, with the world-current in his favor, may hope to get home ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... has had its ebb and flow, and consequently of its proportional casualties; but the British have never once been turned from their programme of observation. There have been critical times, as for example when the Fokker scourge of late 1915 and early 1916 ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... inadequate to the wants of the nation. The succession of several weak kings had brought affairs into this state, when Philippe the Sixth of Valois crowned the misfortunes of the country by entering into a war with England, at a time when the funds of his kingdom were at the lowest ebb; constantly engaged in hostilities, he had not leisure or the means of attending to the welfare of the Parisians, and the disasters he encountered caused his reign to be remembered as a series of misfortunes. Several colleges, however, were founded in his reign; amongst ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... other people's. Even if Owen's marriage is a mistake, and has to be paid for, I believe he'll learn and grow in the paying. Of course I can't make Madame de Chantelle see this; but I can remind her that, with his character—his big rushes of impulse, his odd intervals of ebb and apathy—she may drive him into some worse blunder ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... sand stood forth on the one hand; on the other a high and thick tuft of trees cut off the view; between was the mouth of the huge laver. Twice a day the ocean crowded in that narrow entrance and was heaped between these frail walls; twice a day, with the return of the ebb, the mighty surplusage of water must struggle to escape. The hour in which the Farallone came there was the hour of flood. The sea turned (as with the instinct of the homing pigeon) for the vast receptacle, swept eddying through the gates, was transmuted, as ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... ambitious, as his father seems to have been, of being somebody, it is not unlikely that he may have prized learning the more for being himself without it. William was his oldest son; when his tide of fortune began to ebb, the Poet was in his fourteenth year, and, from his native qualities of mind, we cannot doubt that, up to that time at least, "all the learnings that his town could make him the receiver of he took, as we do air, fast as 'twas ministered, ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... always been a good white gate, respected (as a white gate always is) from its strong declaration of purpose. Outside of it, things may belong to the Crown, the Admiralty, Manor, or Trinity Brethren, or perhaps the sea itself—according to the latest ebb or flow of the fickle tide of Law Courts—but inside that gate everything belongs to the fine ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... in imitation of which example I have placed Lord Peter in a noble house, given him a title to wear and money to spend. There I shall leave him for some time, returning, where common charity directs me, to the assistance of his two brothers at their lowest ebb. However, I shall by no means forget my character of a historian, to follow the truth step by step whatever happens, or wherever it ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... policy. He and his friend Cournant, the liberal notary and the rival of the ministerial notary Auffray, became the close advisers of the Rogrons, to whom they were able to do a couple of signal services. The leases granted by old Rogron to their father in 1815, when matters were at a low ebb, were about to expire. Horticulture and vegetable gardening had developed enormously in the neighborhood of Provins. The lawyer and notary set to work to enable the Rogrons to increase their rentals. Vinet won two lawsuits against two districts on a question of planting trees, which involved five ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... decided the fate of the workman. Containing as this ticket usually did particulars as to the class to which the workman in question belonged; as to the wages he was worth, &c., the scale of ironworkers' wages in the town got to an unbearably low ebb. The masters held the full sway for a while; then the workpeople broke out in open revolt against the pernicious system of their masters, and thus commenced the great "ticket-of-leave" strike. Early in the dispute I was applied to by the strike authorities to write and expose the ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... my tears," she said, smiling; "it was the revulsion of feeling. My life was at a low ebb: if your sentence had been against me it would have been ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... thirty-nine years old. This in six volumes carried the history to 1858 in an interesting, accurate, and impartial narrative. Four of the five chapters of the first volume are entitled "The Material Condition of England in 1815," "Society in England," "Opinion in 1815," "The Last of the Ebb Tide," and they are masterly in their description and relation. During the Napoleonic wars business was good. The development of English manufactures, due largely to the introduction of steam as a motive power, was marked. "Twenty years of war," he wrote, "had concentrated the trade of the ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... often imprisoned by the ebb tide in the channels about Basra. The people harpooned them, and got much oil out of the brain, which they used for lamps, and smearing their ships. This also is clearly the sperm whale. (Ethe, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... when the time for the tide to ebb arrived and there was no ebbing. On the contrary, the water continued to rise. The government observer at the Highlands telephoned that Sandy Hook was submerged. Soon it was known that Coney Island, Rockaway, and all the seaside places along the south shore ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... being—an immensity not possessed, that cannot be possessed." "From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all." Revelation is "an influx of the Divine mind into our mind. It is an ebb of the individual rivulet before the flowing surges of the sea of life." In moods of exaltation, and especially in the presence of nature, this contact of the individual soul with the absolute is felt. "All mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... came the ebb. The reconstructed Roman empire of Augustus soon reduced Armenia, Cappadocia and even the kingdom of the Parthians to a kind of vassalage. But after the middle of the third century the Sassanid dynasty restored the power of Persia and revived its ancient pretensions. From that time until the ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... into his presence, and was the life of the dinner. Harriet seemed absent of mind and nervous, but Emory's spirits were normal, and he was more attentive to Sally Carter than she to him. But Betty's interest in her friends' affairs had dropped to a very low ebb. She was in a new mental world, stranger than that entered by most women, for her hands were empty, but she was happy. She had reflected again—in so far as she had been capable of reflection—that most marriages were prosaic, and that her own high romance, ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... which moves a clock's hands is derived from the arm which winds up the clock, so surely is all terrestrial power drawn from the sun. Leaving out of account the eruptions of volcanoes, and the ebb and flow of the tides, every mechanical action on the earth's surface, every manifestation of power, organic and inorganic, vital and physical, is produced by the sun. His warmth keeps the sea liquid, and the atmosphere a gas, ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... It was the last word in cheerlessness, and there was no reason to think, Bruce told himself, that it would not be in such surroundings that he would end his days. He was tired, hungry; his vitality and spirits were at low ebb. ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... Stoneborough school since Mr. Wilmot had ceased to be an under-master; the whole tone of the school had degenerated, and it was no wonder that the Government inquiries were ominously directed in that quarter. Scholarship was at a low ebb, Dr. Hoxton seemed to have lost what power of teaching he had ever possessed, and as Dr. May observed, the poor old school was going to the dogs. But even in the present state of things, Leonard had no chance of excelling his competitors. ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... always vigorous though occasionally exaggerated. In any of the great departments of activity nationally pursued—as art has been pursued in France since Francis I.—there are always these rival currents, of which now one and now the other constantly affects the ebb and flow of the tide of thought and feeling. The classic and romantic duel of 1830, the rise of the naturalist opposition to Hugo and romanticism in our own day, are familiar instances of this phenomenon in literature. The revolt of Gericault and Delacroix against David ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... mine honesty. When for some trifling present you have bid me Return so much, I have shook my head, and wept; Yea, 'gainst the authority of manners, pray'd you To hold your hand more close: I did endure Not seldom, nor no slight checks, when I have Prompted you in the ebb of your estate And your great flow of debts. My loved lord, Though you hear now, too late, yet now's a time, The greatest of your having lacks a half To ...
— The Life of Timon of Athens • William Shakespeare [Craig edition]
... perpetuate the coalition that had been formed between the mercantile classes and the proletariate, and to wring from the senate an acceptance of the new military genius with his plans for reform, there are clear indications which prove that an ebb of political feeling had been witnessed, even during the last three years—a turn of the tide which shows how utterly unstable the coalition against the senate would have been, had it not been reinforced by the continuance of disasters ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... quite unprovided with any reason for expecting from physical principles that such a law as he discovered must be obeyed. It is quite true that Kepler had some slight knowledge of the existence of what we now know as gravitation. He had even enunciated the remarkable doctrine that the ebb and flow of the tide must be attributed to the attraction of the moon on the waters of the earth. He does not, however, appear to have had any anticipation of those wonderful discoveries which Newton was destined to make a little later, in which he demonstrated that ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... reading of this, Jones was put into a violent flutter. His fortune was then at a very low ebb, the source being stopt from which hitherto he had been supplied. Of all he had received from Lady Bellaston, not above five guineas remained; and that very morning he had been dunned by a tradesman for twice that ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... she was; and the question now was whether the tide was at the ebb or flow at the time she struck. If the former, the likelihood was that as soon as the tide began to rise, the vessel would float off and founder, Boltrope having reported that there were eight feet of water in the hold and ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... brought that life very near the ebb, and friends wondered, of an evening, if next morning they would hear his simple, tender, 'Good-bye to you.' Sir George waited ready, abiding in the faith, witnessing of it, 'Man should have religion as his guide in all things. I feel that God communicates ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... Numerous wild-fowl also were seen, and several were shot. The boats rowed up a river at the head of the bay for four or five miles, and near it a deserted fort of considerable strength was visited. Several beds of oysters were also discovered, dry at half-ebb, and a boat being sent to fetch some, returned completely laden, so that the ship's company had a regular feast of them. Fish, also in abundance, were brought off by the natives. On the north side of the ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... Lewes, and on account of weather had much ado to get ashore. The voyage down the Delaware was slow, for from want of proper lights we must needs lay by at night, and if winds were contrary were forced to wait for the ebb. ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... Danish hands, even if Ethelred of Wessex makes headway enough to be owned as overlord of England by them. Now therefore is there one place in all England where peace has come, and to that place I would go to end my days. Here in London the tide of war will ebb and flow ever. Let me go down with you to Reedham, my son, that I may ...
— Wulfric the Weapon Thane • Charles W. Whistler
... then," said Kate, getting up briskly; "the things that we got will make one good meal, at all events, though the cost of them has reduced our funds to the low ebb of one penny; so, let us ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne
... one was required to grasp the situation and supply a crying deficiency. It was with no trembling hand that Buonaparte laid hold of his task. For an efficient artillery service artillery officers were essential, and there were almost none. In the ebb and flow of popular enthusiasm many republicans who had fallen back before the storms of factional excesses were now willing to come forward, and Napoleon, not publicly committed to the Jacobins, was able to win many capable assistants from among men of his class. His ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... see, hear, and feel when the sense centers are most indelibly impressible, and to give relative rest to the hand during the years when its power of accuracy is abated and when all that is good is idealized furthest, and confidence in ability to produce is at its lowest ebb. ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... is the principal agent in causing the daily ebb and flow of the tide, and this is the most important work which our satellite has to do. The fleets of fishing boats around the coasts time their daily movements by the tide, and are largely indebted to the moon ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... Prieur named of the Cote d'Or, venturing thither, with their olive and sword, are packed into prison: there may Romme lie, under lock and key, 'for fifty days;' and meditate his New Calendar, if he please. Cimmeria and Civil War! Never was Republic One and Indivisible at a lower ebb.— ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... layeth hands on me in this place, Ich lay my brawling iron on his face! By Gog's blood, I defy thy worst; If thou shouldest hang me, I were accurst. I have been at as low an ebb as this, And quickly aloft again, by Gis! I have mo friends than ye think I have; I am entertained of all men like no slave: Yea, within this moneth, I may say to you, I will be your servant and your master too. Yea, creep into your breast, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Robert Dodsley
... end of 1816 the cause of liberty in Chili was at its lowest ebb. After four years of struggle the patriots had met with a crushing defeat in 1814, and had been scattered to the four winds. Since then the viceroy of Spain had ruled the land with an iron hand, many of the leading citizens being banished ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... of the Legion lay dying in Algiers. There was lack of woman's nursing, there was dearth of woman's tears; But a comrade stood beside him, while his life-blood ebb'd away, And bent, with pitying glances, to hear what he might say. The dying soldier faltered, as he took that comrade's hand, And he said, "I never more shall see my own, my native land; Take a message, and a token, to some distant ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... disappearing, the whole neighbourhood is converted into a morass. The Euphrates and its branches do not at all times succeed in reaching the sea: they are lost for the most part in vast lagoons to which the tide comes up, and in its ebb bears their waters away with it. Reeds grow there luxuriantly in enormous beds, and reach sometimes a height of from thirteen to sixteen feet; banks of black and putrid mud emerge amidst the green growth, and give off deadly emanations. Winter is scarcely felt here: snow is unknown, hoar-frost ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... the table. "Are you willing then, to accept a man at the very lowest ebb of his fortunes? I know that if I were of the mould that heroes are made of, I would hesitate to proffer you a blighted life. But I loved you the moment I saw you; and, remembering my fruitless search for you, I cannot run the risk of losing you ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... as you like. You won't tire me when there's no tide and no waves. This is a very different business from getting out the sweeps to pull a nobby five miles against the strength of the ebb, with ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... motion, no current, any more there than in other places. I was at a strange loss to understand this, and resolved to spend some time in the observing it, to see if nothing from the sets of the tide had occasioned it; but I was presently convinced how it was; viz., that the tide of ebb setting from the west, and joining with the current of waters from some great river on the shore, must be the occasion of this current, and that, according as the wind blew more forcibly from the west or from the north, this current came nearer ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... balustrade of the great basin, to speak about a carp. Nobody made any answer. He afterwards addressed his remarks about these carp to some builder's-men who did not keep up the conversation in the regular way; it was but a question of carp with them. Everything was at a low ebb, and the king went away some little time after. As soon as we dared look at one another out of his sight, our eyes meeting told all." There was no venturing beyond looks. Fenelon had said, with severe charity, ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... literature. He was of that ornate school which usually comes last in a national literature, and he came first. American taste had been vitiated by men like Griswold and N. P. Willis until it was at the lowest possible ebb. Willis was considered a genius, that is the worst that could possibly be said. In the North a new race of great philosophers was growing up, but Poe had neither their friendship nor encouragement. He went indeed, sometimes, ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... buildings in Princes Street, Birmingham, the days continued as of old, with the ebb and flow of business. On each floor clerks bent over their high desks and the workers of each concern sat behind their mahogany defences and toiled early and late for the treasure they desired. At stated times rows of grave ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... the wounded, the cleansing of the ship, the feeding of survivors, the shutting up and arranging for the night, had passed away—even the groaning of sufferers had dwindled down to its lowest ebb—long before Pungarin moved with the intent to ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... beach) at the ebb of the tide, the H['e][:i]k['e]-crabs obliquely glare at the apparition of this ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... separate work of art. The long starvation of David Balfour on the island of Earraid, the sharks of crime and monsters of blasphemy that break the peace of the shining tropical lagoons in Treasure Island and The Ebb Tide, the captivity on the Bass Rock in Catriona, the supernatural terrors that hover and mutter over the island of The Merry Men—these imaginations are plainly generated by the scenery against ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... the whole succession, of the company's service. But in the company it gave rise to other sentiments. They did not find the new channels of acquisition flow with equal riches to them. On the contrary, the high flood-tide of private emolument was generally in the lowest ebb of their affairs. They began also to fear that the fortune of war might take away what the fortune of war had given. Wars were accordingly discouraged by repeated injunctions and menaces; and that the servants ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... 1876 found a difficult task before it in undertaking to carry out the objects above referred to. Interest in base ball was at a low ebb. Gamblers were in possession. The game was without discipline, organization or legitimate control. The sport was conducted with dishonest methods and for dishonest purposes, and had neither the respect nor confidence of the press or public. Heroic methods were absolutely necessary. At a ...
— Spalding's Baseball Guide and Official League Book for 1895 • Edited by Henry Chadwick
... number of children, in convalescence from infective disorders, when the nutrition of the body has fallen to a low ebb, show as evidence of cerebral exhaustion a group of symptoms which in a sense are the reverse of those which characterise cerebral irritation and chorea. The healthy child is a creature of free movement. The children ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... undertake such a vigil as this will be familiar with the marked changes (corresponding with phases of the earth's movement) which take place in the atmosphere, at midnight, at two o'clock, and again at four o'clock. During those fours hours falls a period wherein all life is at its lowest ebb, and every Physician is aware that there is a greater likelihood of a patient's passing between midnight and four A. M., than at any other period during the ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... party associates in the Senate, but two or three were brave enough to follow him. Moreover, the panic had swept away his wealth. He was near the end of his term of office, and the trend in Illinois was toward the Republicans. The long tide which had so steadily borne him on to fortune seemed to ebb. Married again but recently, and to the most beautiful woman in Washington, he must have had in mind, as he took up his new role, some such thought as that which fortified his favorite hero at Marengo: one battle was lost, ...
— Stephen Arnold Douglas • William Garrott Brown
... hours. It does not appear in the form of a single mass or islet, but in a succession of serrated ledges of various heights, between and amongst which the sea flows until the tide has fallen pretty low. At full ebb the rock appears like a dark islet, covered with seaweed, and studded with deep pools of water, most of which are connected with the sea by narrow channels running between the ledges. The highest part of the rock does ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne
... sufficient interest in affairs going on around him to realise the state of musical art in America, so he scarcely knew how to begin. It seemed like the commencement of a new life. The period was that between Jenny Lind and Adelina Patti, and he soon realised that musical art was at its lowest ebb. There were one or two ambitious orchestra conductors in America; one in Chicago trying to introduce the Wagnerian polyphonic school, and perhaps one or two in New York; but the public clamoured after divas, ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... snoring unmelodiously, and not dreaming a thing; for when a cow-puncher has nothing in particular to do, he sleeps to atone for the weary hours when he must be very wide-awake. An avalanche descended upon his unwarned middle, and checked the rhythmic ebb and flow of sound. He squawked and came ...
— Rowdy of the Cross L • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B.M. Bower
... drop by drop upon her tongue from the side—the little ones pressing closer and closer. Even in the convulsive trembling that took her body from time to time there was an inflowing rather than the ebb of strength. ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... death-bed or tiptoe precautions. The picture needs not another scar or stain, now, to be the saddest work of art in the world; and battered, defaced, ruined as it is, it remains one of the greatest. We may really compare its anguish of decay to the slow conscious ebb of life in a human organism. The production of the prodigy was a breath from the infinite, and the painter's conception not immeasurably less complex than the scheme, say, of his own mortal constitution. There has been much talk lately of the irony of fate, but I suspect fate was never ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... geological evidence which is appreciated by the natives themselves: i.e. the finding of mussel shells on the hills far inland. The principle of the tides is recognized in what is otherwise a fairy tale; "There will be no more ebb-tide or flood if you strangle me," says the Moon Man to ...
— Eskimo Folktales • Unknown
... Cincinnati. It had six churches—several more than were absolutely needed. The Baptists were strong, the Presbyterians were strenuous, the Episcopalians were exclusive, while the Congregationalists were at ebb-tide through the rascality of a preacher who had recently decamped and thrown a blanket of disgrace over the whole denomination for ten miles up the creek. Thus were things when Henry Ward Beecher assumed his first charge. The ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... mountain side, Thousands of feet above the lake-sea's lip, A rock in which old waters' rise and dip, Plunge and recoil, and backward eddying tide Had, age-long, worn, while races lived and died, Involved channels, where the sea-weed's drip Followed the ebb; and now earth-grasses sip Fresh dews from heaven, whereby on earth they bide— I sat and gazed southwards. A dry flow Of withering wind blew on my drooping strength From o'er the awful desert's burning length. Behind me piled, away and upward go Great sweeps of savage mountains—up, ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... will she be permitted to remain in bed long enough to allow conditions to be favorable to getting up without "taking a chance"? Inasmuch as her muscular tone is poor, her strength depleted, her vitality wasted, her ambition and hope at a low ebb, nature should be given a longer time, under the most favorable hygienic and domestic conditions, to help in the problem of readjustment, because her whole future, as an efficient machine, as wife, as mother, as home-maker, and as an economic individuality, is dependent upon how this crisis ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... woeful men were we. And on we went on our woeful way, wrapped in a daze of dream, And the Northern Lights in the crystal nights came forth with a mystic gleam. They danced and they danced the devil-dance over the naked snow; And soft they rolled like a tide upshoaled with a ceaseless ebb and flow. They rippled green with a wondrous sheen, they fluttered out like a fan; They spread with a blaze of rose-pink rays never yet seen of man. They writhed like a brood of angry snakes, hissing ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... moments nothing more was said; the old man continued to sob and the life of his companion continued to ebb away. The brutal blow that caused his death had mercifully numbed the power of feeling, so that whatever the gloomy journey he was about to take might mean to him, whether the same life he was leaving, ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... unbounded wave! Angels shall tire their wings, but find no spot: Not even a rock from out the liquid grave Shall lift its point to save, 90 Or show the place where strong Despair hath died, After long looking o'er the ocean wide For the expected ebb which cometh not: All shall be void, Destroyed![147] Another element shall be the lord Of life, and the abhorred Children of dust be quenched; and of each hue Of earth nought left but the unbroken blue; And of the variegated mountain 100 Shall nought remain Unchanged, or of the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... Castle was abreast, speed was increased to 30 knots. There was an easterly breeze blowing against the ebb-tide, with the result that quite a choppy sea was met with outside Southampton Water. Like a knife, the sharp cutwater of the Capella cleft the waves, sending up showers of white spray; but such was her speed that, before the wind could carry the spindrift on deck, the ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... of the ill-fated Jehoiachin. He was the third son of Josiah, and, like his brothers, Jehoahaz and Jehoiakim, he was to see the fortunes of Judah ebb to their lowest point, and finally to witness the destruction of the capital and the ...
— Stories of the Prophets - (Before the Exile) • Isaac Landman
... beach some barelegged children were wading in the surf's bubbling ebb, hunting for king-crabs; an old black mammy, wearing apron and scarlet turban, sat luxuriously in the burning sand watching her thin-legged charges, and cooking the "misery" out of her aged bones. Virginia could see nobody else, except a distant swimmer beyond the ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... reduced—unwilling to alarm his mother by informing her of his illness—without Valentine to console him, or Mat to amuse him, Zack's spirits now sank to a far lower ebb than they had ever fallen to before. In his present state of depression, feebleness, and solitude, there were moments when he doubted of his own recovery, in spite of all that the doctor could tell him. While in this frame of mind, the remembrance ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... and his patience began to ebb. For the first time he assumed the offensive. Pressing Selim close, he feinted quickly twice, and catching the other off guard he brought his sword down on the stranger's with a crash. There was a flash of sparks, a sharp ring of metal on stones, and of ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott |
