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Glacier   Listen
noun
Glacier  n.  An immense field or stream of ice, formed in the region of perpetual snow, and moving slowly down a mountain slope or valley, as in the Alps, or over an extended area, as in Greenland. Note: The mass of compacted snow forming the upper part of a glacier is called the firn, or névé; the glacier proper consist of solid ice, deeply crevassed where broken up by irregularities in the slope or direction of its path. A glacier usually carries with it accumulations of stones and dirt called moraines, which are designated, according to their position, as lateral, medial, or terminal (see Moraine). The common rate of flow of the Alpine glaciers is from ten to twenty inches per day in summer, and about half that in winter.
Glacier theory (Geol.), the theory that large parts of the frigid and temperate zones were covered with ice during the glacial, or ice, period, and that, by the agency of this ice, the loose materials on the earth's surface, called drift or diluvium, were transported and accumulated.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Glacier" Quotes from Famous Books



... of the People. Want of Cleanliness. The Plague. History. Native Dynasties. The British Rule. Progress. Tea Planting. The Irrigation of the Bhabhur. Wild Beasts. Treaty with the Ghoorkhas. Modes of Travelling. Journey to the Pindaree Glacier. 232 ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy

... up and preparing to go out to sea. In the night of the 19th had descended a frigid blast, colder than the original one. This had arrested the broken ice, piled it up in all sorts of fantastic forms, and congealed it till it looked like a rough Alaskan glacier. After the cold wind had come a heavy snowstorm. All Colchester lay under three feet of snow. Footpaths and roads were broken out somewhat in the immediate village, but no farther. It was most unusual to have the river closed so early in the season, and consequently the winter supplies, which were ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various

... also a remarkable impression of the irresistible growth of his popularity and influence. The silent energy of the Divine purpose presses his fortunes onward with a motion slow and inevitable as that of a glacier. The steadfast flow circles unchecked round, or rises victorious over all hindrances. Efforts to ruin, to degrade, to kill—one and all fail. Terror and hate, suspicion and jealousy, only bring him nearer the goal. A ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren

... dozen or two 'species' of bears—even making different 'species' of the black bears of the southern Mississippi bottoms—Arkansas, Louisiana, etc.—and I don't know how many sorts of 'blue bears' and 'straw bears,' 'glacier bears,' etc., among the grizzlies. Of course, bears differ, just as men do. But the one thing which remains constant is the length of the claws, or front toe nails—what the Journal calls their 'talons.' In a black bear these are always short. In a grizzly ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough

... Agassiz's marvellous theory of the Great Amazonian glacier, 2,000 miles long! I presume that will be a little too much, even for you. I have been writing a little popular paper on "Glacial Theories" for the Quarterly Journal of Science of January next, in which I stick up for glaciers in North America ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant

... M. C. A. worker, in due course arrived at Bologna and was assigned for service with the Seventh Italian army, located in the head of the Val Camonica and holding the front line around Tonale Pass and Mt. Adamello, a glacier 11,700 feet high. ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt

... together with the other hills and wooded terraces which stretched away from it along the side of the valley, had been formed by the minute fragments of rock and soil, which, during ages and ages, had been gradually pushed down from the mountains by a great glacier which once occupied the country to the northeast of my house. "Why, Walter, my boy," he cried, "if I had not read it all in the books I should have known for myself, as soon as I came here, that there had once been a glacier up there, and as it gradually moved to the southwest ...
— My Terminal Moraine - 1892 • Frank E. Stockton

... not venture upon this feat of daring, but his daughter was so anxious to accompany us that when I offered to look after her she was entrusted to my care. I took two mules and a guide, thinking that sufficient. From Montanvert and down to the glacier, the road was bad, a steep, rocky path, with loose, rolling stones. When we came to the Ice Sea, the young lady, as was natural, took the guide's hand, and I, the last of the caravan, strode cautiously along, my alpenstock in my hand, over the slippery, billow-like ice. But ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes

... reft the face Of brightly gleaming ice, that upward led. Their clear green depths a gap impassable present Across the glacier slope ahead; Save on yon steep and scintillating slope Which promises success to axe ...
— The Last West and Paolo's Virginia • G. B. Warren

... a fascination in the project, as we discuss a summer tour. There, we know, are mountains whose sides are nearly Alpine, whose shoulders are of snow and glacier, whose heads rise to ten and eleven thousand feet above the sea. There, we know, must be savage scenery,—ravines, cliffs, ice-rivers, as in the Alps; valleys and streams and fair pastures as well, and a richer southern sunlight over the uplands; besides a people less warped by tourists, ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix

... with nature. But it was not to be. Even nature was powerless to "minister to a mind diseased." At the conclusion of his second tour (September 29, 1816), he is constrained to admit that "neither the music of the shepherd, the crashing of the avalanche, nor the torrent, the mountain, the glacier, the forest, nor the cloud, have for one moment lightened the weight upon my heart, nor enabled me to lose my own wretched identity in the majesty, and the power, and the glory, around, above, and beneath me" (Life, p. 315). Perhaps Wordsworth ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron

... cave bears in the timber, and gaunt, lean wolves—huge creatures twice the size of our Canadian timber-wolves. Farther up we were assailed by enormous white bears—hungry, devilish fellows, who came roaring across the rough glacier tops at the first glimpse of us, or stalked us stealthily by scent when they had not yet ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... dwarfed junipers—earthward-creeping—nearly reach the summit. When I passed here on a former trip, on the 6th of June, this peak was shrouded in snow. There are some patches of snow even now, one of them descending in glacier fashion down the slope on the other side; they call it "eternal," but I question whether it will survive the heats of autumn. Beyond a brace of red-legged partridges, I saw no birds whatever. This group of Pollino, descending its seven thousand ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas

... group of mountains was once covered, all but the highest peaks, by the Laurentian glacier, whose erosion, while perhaps having little effect on the large features of the region, has greatly modified it in detail, producing lakes and ponds to the number of more than 1,300 and causing ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous

... the glistening stars twinkled down through an ocean of space, touching frosted particles of matter with scintillations of light, and making them glitter like diamonds—world- old, transparent jewels, set in the cold, ice-blue crown of the eternal glacier. ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson

... light up one's memory for ever. How glorious that cathedral is! worthy almost of standing face to face with the snow Alps; and itself a sort of snow dream by an artist architect, taken asleep in a glacier! Then the Da Vinci Christ did not disappoint us, which is saying much. It is divine. And the Lombard school generally was delightful after Bologna and those soulless Caracci! I have even given up Guido, and Guercino too, since knowing more of them. Correggio, on the other ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning

... 43-1/2 feet thick surrounding the whole sun would in one minute be melted by the sun's heat underneath. A somewhat more elegant illustration was also given by Sir John Herschel, who showed that if a cylindrical glacier 45 miles in diameter were to be continually flowing into the sun with the velocity of light, the end of that glacier would be melted as quickly as it advanced. From each square foot in the surface of the ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball

... never could endure, - these are things, are they not, dear reader? which we usually look upon as the very highest summits of our earthly joys, that still shine most radiantly when our sun is near its setting. But know then too that joy and bliss are of more imperishable matter than rock and glacier, and that very sublime beauty is more clearly perceived from a distance. Long ago, I have observed that most happiness can be valued best when it lies a certain distance behind us, and one must grow old to taste the full flavor of beauty at the very ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden

... the mast-head to the water's edge; there is not much of a sea, but when a wave does throw a jet of water over the craft it freezes like magic, and adds yet another layer to a heap which is making the deck resemble a miniature glacier. ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman

... Dana will tell us by what furnaces of fire the granite was melted, by what teeth of glaciers and weight of sea-waves the earth's surface was smoothed for the plow and the trowel. How long it has been since the glacier was a mile thick upon the very spot where we stand, how long since the waters of Lake Michigan, now flowing over Niagara, ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis

... again when the tide was in, and our next awakening was on the grand glacier fields. The greatest sight of the entire trip, or of any other in America, now opened out before many eager eyes. For several days, icebergs had been seen sailing along on the smooth surface from the great glaciers, and speeding to the southern seas like phantom ships. As the ...
— Oregon, Washington and Alaska; Sights and Scenes for the Tourist • E. L. Lomax

... After such gales, the castings present a gently inclined and smooth, or sometimes furrowed, surface to windward, while they are steeply inclined or precipitous to leeward, so that they resemble on a miniature scale glacier-ground hillocks of rock. They are often cavernous on the leeward side, from the upper part having curled over the lower part. During one unusually heavy south-west gale with torrents of rain, many castings were wholly blown to leeward, so that the mouths of the burrows were left naked ...
— The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the action of worms with • Charles Darwin

... range culminates in the north-west near the Muztagh pass in a group of majestic peaks including K 2 or Mount Godwin Austen (28,265 feet), Gasherbrum, and Masherbrum, which tower over and feed the vast Boltoro glacier. The first of these giants is the second largest mountain in the world. The Duke of the Abruzzi ascended it to the height of 24,600 feet, and so established a climbing record. The Muztagh chain carries on the northern bastion to the valley of the Hunza river and the western ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie

... future mining success, that she readily yielded to his urgent request for a speedy marriage, that she might accompany him on his first trip to Alaska. And thus it was they sailed away on their bridal tour, their destination that far off land of flashing glacier and unexplored forest, almost, if not quite, beyond the borders of civilization. This long voyage to an unknown country had no terrors for them. They were all the world to each other. A bright halo of hope and happiness spread ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson

... It would set the inheritance of the Byzantine Emperors in the diadem of Peter the Great. It would make the Sea of Marmara and the ridges of the Caucasus, paths to illimitable empire and uncompromising despotism. It moves down the map of the world, as a glacier moves down the Alps, patient and relentless, startling the jealous rivals that watch its course, and granting contemptuous peace to the allies ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin

... accept this explanation, the landlady withdrew, and Will paced thoughtfully about the floor. He was back in Switzerland, in the valley which rises to the glacier of Trient. Before him rambled Ralph Pomfret and his wife; at his side was Rosamund Elvan, who listened with a flattering air of interest to all he said, but herself spoke seldom, and seemed, for the most part, preoccupied with ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing

... energy she rose again and started blindly down the darkness. She must get out. She might be lost in here for days, freeze to death and lie embedded in the ice like corpses she had read of, kept perfectly preserved until the melting of a glacier. Harry probably thought she had left with the others—he had gone by now; no one would know until next day. She reached pitifully for the wall. Forty inches thick, they had said—forty ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... paper published many years afterwards in the 'Philosophical Magazine' ('Philosophical Magazine,' 1842.), a house burnt down by fire did not tell its story more plainly than did this valley. If it had still been filled by a glacier, the phenomena would have been less ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin

... the Great Schiedeck, where H. and W. botanized, while I slept. Thence we rode down the mountain till we reached Rosenlaui, where, I am free to say, a dinner was to me a more interesting object than a glacier. Therefore, while H. and W. went to the latter, I turned off to the inn, amid ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe

... the islands, rising steeply from the sea, are rugged and mountainous; South Georgia is largely barren and has steep, glacier-covered mountains; the South Sandwich Islands are of volcanic origin with ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... things told me, I should have liked particularly to chronicle two at length. One is the story of a tiny Indian spindle that spun by itself in the dust, and the other, though it had no marvel in it, except the marvel of maternal feeling, is the story of a chamois and her young one on a glacier-pass. The English mountaineer who told it me, was on a difficult climb. Suddenly he saw to his astonishment a chamois, the shyest of all animals, standing stock- still on a steep glacier. She actually let him come so close to her that ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey

... regarded by many as the most sublime feature of the Valley, is seen through the pine groves, standing forward beyond the general line of the wall in most imposing grandeur, a type of permanence. It is 3300 feet high, a plain, severely simple, glacier-sculptured face of granite, the end of one of the most compact and enduring of the mountain ridges, unrivaled in height ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir

... to sea and had fair winds until they sighted Greenland, and the fells below the glacier; then one of the men spoke up and said: 'Why do you steer the ship so close to the wind?' Leif answered: 'I have my mind upon my steering and upon other matters as well. Do you not see anything out of the common?' They replied ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various

... last named also selected from the glacier of the Aar, at the request of Alexander Agassiz, the boulder which now marks his father's grave. With unwearied patience Mr. Mayor passed hours of toilsome search among the blocks of the moraine ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz

... Lake is the Glacier, its moist surface suggesting that the lake is fed by a slight thaw, while the perpendicular front at the water's edge gives the impression of a berg having recently broken off ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen

... on her seal-skin sacque, Into her husband's sleigh She slipped, and hid behind his pack Just as he drove away. "Great Bears!" growled Santa in his beard, "A goodly freight have I; Were't fouler weather, I had feared The glacier path ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow, Vol. IV (of IV) • Harrison S. Morris

... in his teeth and claws to stretch it out. It snapped, and his head was smartly bumped against the wall. St. Britius laughed aloud. The officiating priest rebuked him, but, on being told what had happened, improved the accident for the edification of his hearers.22 On the bursting of a certain glacier on the Alps, it is said the devil was seen swimming down the Rhone, a drawn sword in one hand, a golden ball in the other: opposite the town of Martigny, he cried, "Rise," and instantly the obedient river swelled above its banks ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... lowlands complains of violent headache, a propensity to vomit, and a difficulty of breathing. The Arenal is often swept by snow-storms; and history has it that some of the Spanish conquerors were here frozen to death. The pale yellow gravel is considered by some geologists as the moraine of a glacier. It is spread out like a broad gravel walk, so that, without exaggeration, one of the best roads in Ecuador has been made by Nature's hand on ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton

... of deepest amethyst dropped around the mountain's mighty shoulders. And then from every snow and glacier-crowned peak, from minaret and pinnacle and towering turret, leaped forth a confusion of soft peacock flames, a host of irised prismatic gleamings, an ordered chaos ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt

... amphitheatre. This passed, the end of the world seems gained: a vast semicircle of rocks rises precipitously to the height of between 1000 and 2000 feet. These gigantic walls are divided into three or four steps or ledges, on each of which rests a glacier, from which stream cascades. That to the left is 1266 feet high, and bears the reputation of being the highest waterfall in Europe. The summit of this wondrous amphitheatre is crowned by everlasting ice and snow, resting on the crests of the Cylindre, so ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 456 - Volume 18, New Series, September 25, 1852 • Various

... investigation frequently led him into dangers that imperiled both life and limb. In the summer of 1841, for example, he was lowered into a deep crevasse bristling with huge stalactites of ice, to reach the heart of a glacier moving at the rate of forty feet a day. While he was observing the blue bands on the glittering ice, he suddenly touched a well of water, and only after great difficulty made his companions understand his signal for rescue. These Alpine experiences are well described by Mrs. Elizabeth ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... off this intruding rock she was steamed round to the edge of the fast ice, near the glacier tongue which juts out between Cape Evans and Cape Barne. We placed her ice-anchors, and after that Wilson and I went on board and had a yarn with Pennell, whom we brought back to tea. Scott was awfully nice to him about the grounding ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans

... monstrous boulders, slabs, and fragments piled up in chaotic fashion. In very hot and long summers, the ice-fields are denuded even in the higher regions, and then a much greater amount of blue-green glacier-ice glances down into the valley, many knobs and depressions are laid bare which one otherwise sees only covered with white, the muddy edge of the ice comes to view with its deposit of rocks, silt, and slime, and far greater volumes ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various

... the result of the grinding and polishing of an ancient, slow-moving glacier, but some other force had deposited them ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard

... the divide from Crater Lake was across a small glacier. Here was a well-defined trail. But above the glacier, which was also above timber-line, was naught but a chaos of naked rock and enormous boulders. There was no way of seeing the trail in the darkness, and ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London

... regarded with any other sensation than that of weariness, all the more painful because accompanied with reaction from the high excitement caused by the splendour of the Bernese Oberland. The traveller—foot-sore, feverish, and satiated with glacier and precipice,—lies back in the corner of the diligence, perceiving little more than that the road is winding and hilly, and the country through which it passes, cultivated and tame. Let him, however, only do this tame country the justice ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin

... Sorbonne over the Academy!" cried Ardan. "Vive la Sorbonne! Not that I'm a bit proud of finding myself in the midst of a temperature so very distingue—though it is more than three times colder than Hayes ever felt it at Humboldt Glacier or Nevenoff at Yakoutsk. If Madame the Moon becomes as cold as this every time that her surface is withdrawn from the sunlight for fourteen days, I don't think, boys, that her hospitality ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne

... to observe its surface, which we saw to be covered by a vast number of penguins, so we knew a landing must be available somewhere, for these birds are wingless. This island was composed entirely of ice, it being, as Hartog reckoned, a glacier which had broken off from the main continent into the sea. It was drifting north, and would gradually melt in the warmer atmosphere to which the current was taking it, but many years must elapse before this ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes

... A glacier hangs in air above the frozen lakes, with all its green-blue ice-cliffs glistening in intensest light. Pitz Palu shoots aloft like sculptured marble, delicately veined with soft aerial shadows of ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds

... led through the village. It was asleep. I remember a gleam in just one of the houses. The moonlight seemed to have drowned all the lamps of the world. I came to the stream, rushing cold from its far-off glacier-mother, crossed it, and went down the bank opposite the chalet: I had taken a fancy to see it from that side. Glittering and glancing under the moon, the wild little river rushed joyous to its fearful fall. ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald

... winter, and it continued to snow till the mountains were hidden. Then the snow was packed into ice, and Canada became one solid glacier. This ice age continued for many ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education

... expected. They are building a great deal; among other things, a new Bishop's Palace and a new Nunnery,—to inhabit either of which ex officio I feel myself very unsuitable. From Sion we came to Brieg; a little village in a nook, close under an enormous mountain and glacier, where it lies like a molehill, or something smaller, at the foot of a haystack. Here also we slept; and the next day our voiturier, who had brought us from Lausanne, started with us up the Simplon Pass; helped on ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle

... size, till they finally form a continuous inland-ice which, like those of Greenland and Spitzbergen, with its enormous ice-sheet, levels mountains and valleys, and converts the interior of the land into a wilderness of ice, and forms one of the fields for the formation of icebergs or glacier-iceblocks, which play so great a role in sketches of voyages in the Polar seas. I have not myself visited the inland-ice on the northern part of Novaya Zemlya, but doubtless the experience I have previously gained ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold

... Nuvolau; but it has the advantage of being very near the wild jumble of the Sexten Dolomites. The Three Shoemakers and a lot more of sharp and ragged fellows are close by, on the east; on the west, Cristallo shows its fine little glacier, and Rothwand its crimson cliffs; and southward Misurina gives to the view a glimpse of water, without which, indeed, no view is complete. Moreover, the mountain has the merit of being, as its name implies, quite gentle. I met the Deacon and the ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke

... was of the boulder type. How many decades was the smooth, worn rock in front of his house riding on the crest of a glacier until it reached its halt? But now it would need a double charge of dynamite to shake it from its base. It generally took the mountain lad days, perhaps weeks, to make up his mind, even upon such a simple ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various

... less than an immense cliff of the clearest crystal ice, towering some three hundred feet above the water's edge, and extending so far northward along the coast that its northern extremity lay far below the horizon. It was the magnificent Humboldt Glacier. The afternoon sun was shining full upon its rugged face, causing the enormous mass to flash and gleam like a gigantic diamond. As they coasted slowly along, at a distance of about half a mile from its face, the dazzling flashes of light were reproduced one after the other, ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood

... husband. He had never done anything sudden in his life. Every resolve was the result of a long process of mind, and every act of importance had to be previewed from all possible points. An honest man, strongly religious, and a great admirer of The Pilot, but slow-moving as a glacier, although with plenty of fire ...
— The Sky Pilot • Ralph Connor

... a body from the ground, the energy which has been imparted to it is energy of position, or potential energy. A glacier high up the mountain possesses potential energy, because of its position. By the mere fact that it is situated high up the mountain, it has a capacity for doing work by its descent, and if that descent be very sudden, the ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper

... mountain elder-berries and lots of flowers in the grass. There was the glacier, the roar of the river and a plaintive little chapel on a green knoll under the great cliff of ice which cut the sky. There was a fat, crumby woman making hay. ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler

... which our consciences command us, unless we are drawn by Him Who is before us there on the road, and see the shining of His garments as He sets His face forward, and draws us after Him. It is easy to climb a glacier when the guide has cut with his ice-axe the steps in which he sets his feet, and we may set ours. The sternness of duty, and the rigidity of law, and the coldness of 'I ought,' are all changed when duty consists in following Christ, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren

... about it! It was awful to think it would come again. I do believe it was only one of those creaks in the timbers which announce the torpid, age-long, sinking flow of every house back to the dust—a motion to which the flow of the glacier is as a torrent, but which is no less inevitable and sure. Day and night it ceases not; but only in the night, when house and heart are still, do we hear it. No wonder it should sound fearful! for are we not the immortal dwellers ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald

... first on the scene of sensation. Didama was seldom beaten. Mr. Ellery's catechism began. Before it was over Keziah opened the door to admit Miss Pepper and her brother. "Kyan" was nervous and embarrassed in the housekeeper's presence. Lavinia was a glacier, moving majestically and freezing as it moved. Keziah, however, was not even touched by the frost; she greeted the pair cordially, and begged them ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln

... Midday, there is some of the most beautyfull and grandest sights I have ever had the pleasure to look upon. I am shure if I could only write on the subject I could make it very interesting. I never seen such beautyfull wild nature in all my travels; there is mountain after mountain of Glacier and they seem to have all the colors of the rainbow, it was a little cold too and the whole Mountains sparkled like diamonds. 6. P.M. drop anchor in the Harber of Sandy Point, Chili. Had the public bin able to see us, They would not stop runing for the ...
— The Voyage of the Oregon from San Francisco to Santiago in 1898 • R. Cross

... set off at an imprudent rate of walking, which greatly exhausted him before he had scaled the first range of the green and low hills. He was, moreover, surprised, on surmounting them, to find that a large glacier, of whose existence, notwithstanding his previous knowledge of the mountains, he had been absolutely ignorant, lay between him and the source of the Golden River. He entered on it with the boldness of a practised ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry

... South to sit in solemn feast, Two men did mostly fascinate the Muse, Differing in genius, but with equal views: One measuring heaven, in starry lore supreme; The other lighting, like the morning beam, Old Ocean's bed, or his fresh Alpine snows, Reading the laws whereby the glacier grows, Or life, through some half-intimated plan, Rose from a star-fish to the race of man: Choose thine own monarch! either well might reign! I knew but one before,—and now ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... There's a lot of ice in the North Pacific but it's mostly in small pans. No big stuff comes through Bering Strait. It would strand. And then the Aleutian and Kuril Islands make a sort of breakwater to head off big bergs. But in the North Atlantic there's nothing to keep the big Greenland glacier breaks from floating south right into the very path of the steamers. In fact that's what they do. You'll see some ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Life-Savers • Francis Rolt-Wheeler

... perfection. Now, you would say, what could be simpler than to fling a rope to the prisoners and let them walk across on the dry rocks? That's your ignorance and your contempt for details; for no Alpine guides, about to cross the crevasses of a dangerous glacier, with a nervous and timid following of tourists, ever made half the preparations that Jem Deady and his followers made on this occasion. Two stout fishermen, carrying a strong cable, clambered down the cliff, and crossed the narrow ledge of rock, now wet with ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan

... the United Provinces as with countries to which they made no pretensions; and to spend the best part of another year in futile efforts to recal that phrase; if all this had been recklessness and haste, then, surely, the most sluggish canal in Holland was a raging cataract, and the march of a glacier ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... the beginning of the spring he returned to the village, purchased building utensils, and day after day carried them back with him up into the mountain. He hired no labour, he rejected the proffered assistance of his brother guides. Choosing an almost inaccessible spot, at the edge of the great glacier, far from all paths, he built himself a hut, with his own hands; and there for eighteen ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome

... abroad, and so the dinner was gay. Urquhart confined himself to the two boys, and told them about the Folgefond—of its unknown depth, of the crevasses, of the glacier on its western edge, of certain white snakes, bred by the snow, which might be found there. Their ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett

... well canst run, Proteus, 'twixt rise and set of sun, Well pleased with logger-camps in Maine As where Milan's pale Duomo lies A stranded glacier on the plain, Its peaks and pinnacles of ice Melted in many a quaint device, And sees, across the city's din, Afar its silent Alpine kin; I track thee over carpets deep To Wealth's and Beauty's inmost keep; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... to the shattered cliff That the glacier's torrent thundered under; And the unfledged eaglet's lifted eye Looked out on the world of peak and ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove

... dark forms upthrust like strange masters of the deep. Towers took shape and islands upheaved, crowned with dark fortresses. To the west a vast and inky-black Gibraltar magically appeared. Soon the sea was but a prodigious river flowing within the high walls of an ancient glacier, a ghost of the icy stream that once ground its slow way ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland

... had done speaking, I said to him, in my turn: "Let me tell you a bear story. One autumn day when I had crossed the mountains by the great Sulitelma glacier and was descending the eastern slope on my way to the Gulf of Bothnia, my Lapp guide and I saw a big brown bear in the distance, but as it was almost dark we decided not to go after him, for the country was very stony. We camped that day in a forest of pines, in order to be sheltered ...
— The Land of the Long Night • Paul du Chaillu

... fine glow we steamed into a lovely cove under a towering height. A deserted, or almost deserted, fishing village stood upon a green bottom land—a mere handful of lodges, with a young growth of trees beyond, and an older growth between these and the glacier that was glistening above them all. A cannery looking nearly new stood at the top of a tall dock on stilts. On the extreme end of the dock was a figure—a man, and a white man at that—with both hands in his pockets, and an ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains to Alaska • Charles Warren Stoddard

... products; wheat little cultivated; little hay made for winter; the horses then feeding chiefly on straw and oats." "The arable land ran in narrow slips," with "stony wastes between, like the moraines of a glacier." The hay meadow was an undrained marsh, where rank grasses, mingled with rushes and other aquatic plants, yielded a coarse fodder. About the time when George the First became King of England, Lord Haddington introduced the sowing of clover and other ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy

... knowledge, but mistook upon the map the River Main for a turnpike road, and commanded the retreat accordingly. Ever since, our troops have called that river 'La chausee de Liebeau'. He was not more fortunate in Helvetia. Being ordered to cross one of the mountains, he marched his men into a glacier, where twelve perished before he was aware ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... the post Ross realized how much skill had gone into its construction. It looked as if they were merely coming up to the outer edge of a glacier tongue. Had it not been for the track in the snow, there would have been no reason to suspect that the ice covered anything but a thick core of its own substance. Ross was shoved through the white-walled ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton

... great banner, bearing simply the letters S.P.Q.R., comes flapping round the windy corner, one starts in wonder at the permanent might of that vast superstition which has grasped the very central symbol of ancient empire, and brought it down, like a boulder on a glacier, into modern days. It makes all Christianity seem but a vast palimpsest, since the letters which once meant "Senatus Populusque Romanus" stand now only for the feebler modern formula, "Salve populum ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various

... coincided with our own inclinations, we naturally considered it the wisest of all, especially as the invitation to bear-hunts and glacier-scrambles was not particularly tempting to our party. The kind reader will perceive this for himself when he learns that it consisted of an English writer, who, still hale and hearty in spite of his threescore years and ten, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various

... of creature form from his temples, and proclaimed from their minarets "There is no god but God." Opposite in their character and mission, alike in their magnificence of energy, they came from the North and from the South, the glacier torrent and the lava stream; they met and contended over the wreck of the Roman empire; and the very center of the struggle, the point of pause of both, the dead water of the opposite eddies, charged with embayed fragments of the Roman wreck, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various

... barked again, angrily, and not until she spoke sharply did he obey, and followed her unwillingly up the slope and then down into a hollow that looked as if at one time it might have been the bed of some great glacier. ...
— Cutlass and Cudgel • George Manville Fenn

... but not the mother. So the old grandfather received instead of a daughter, a daughter's son in his house; the little one, who laughed more than he wept, but, who now, seemed to have lost this custom. A change in him, had certainly taken place, in the cleft of the glacier, in the wonderful cold world; where, according to the belief of the Swiss peasant, the souls of the damned are incarcerated ...
— The Ice-Maiden: and Other Tales. • Hans Christian Andersen

... space between the boulder and the underlying rock. Near by, at foot of a new storm-wall, are two similar but somewhat smaller boulders which, like their venerated and more famous neighbour, were all wrenched originally by a glacier from their home in the Comeragh Mountains ...
— Lives of SS. Declan and Mochuda • Anonymous

... avalanche, as, after a drifting storm, a mass of snow, too heavy to keep its place, slides and tumbles from the mountain peak. There is also, now and then, a loud crack of the ice in the nearest glacier; and, as many declare, there is a crackling to be heard by those who listen when the northern lights are shooting and blazing across the sky. Nor is this all. Wherever there is a nook between the rocks on the shore, where a man may build ...
— Feats on the Fiord - The third book in "The Playfellow" • Harriet Martineau

... by it,...and I do not wonder at it. To bring all IDEAL systems within the domain of science, and give good physical or natural explanations of all his capital points, is as bad as to have Forbes take the glacier materials...and give scientific ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin

... long white beard grown filthy by neglect. Whereat the prince with shuddering horror shook, And cried, 'O world! must I be such for thee?' And once he led the chase of a wild boar In the great forest near the glacier's foot; On Kantaka so fleet he soon outstripped The rest, and in the distance disappeared. But when at night they reached the rendezvous, Siddartha was not there; and through the night They searched, ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles

... like a blue, swelling river between Denmark and Sweden. The ships of all nations sail past daily by hundreds; in winter the ice forms a firm bridge between the two countries, and when in spring this breaks up, it resembles a floating glacier. The scenery here made a lively impression upon me, but I dared only to cast stolen glances at it. When the school hours were over, the house door was commonly locked; I was obliged to remain in the heated school-room and learn my ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen

... the melting not only of the winter's snow, but also of older layers of ice, which were suddenly liquified by the permeation of hot steam and lava, and which had been previously preserved from melting by a deposit of sand and ashes, as in the case of the ancient glacier found near the summit of the mountain ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum

... concede the spirit of enterprise. As for this candidacy of Potts, Horace Greeley once said, commenting, we think, on some action of Weed's, "I like cool things, of ordinary dimensions—an iceberg or a glacier; but this arctic circle of coagulation appalls credulity and paralyzes indignation. Hence my numbness!" Hence, also, our own numbness. But, though Speech lieth prone on a paralytic's couch, ACTION is hearty and stalketh willingly abroad. In this campaign it will ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson

... as at any other period the temperature would be too high and the bottles would burst. MM. Riedmatten and De Quay have two varieties of sparkling wine—their Carte Blanche, which goes under the name of Mont Blanc, and is rather sweet, and their Carte Verte known as Glacier de Rhne, a drier variety and finding ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly

... modern industrial civilization of which we are sometimes wont to boast, a certain glacier-like process may be observed. The bewildered, the helpless—and there are many—are torn from the parent rock, crushed, rolled smooth, and left stranded in strange places. Thus was Edward Bumpus severed and rolled from the ancestral ledge, from the firm granite ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... the truth, they are quite likely to use college slang and know which fork to use first. Not on the Zone, but proper to be mentioned here, are the Blackfoot Indians brought to the Exposition from Glacier Park by the Great Northern Railroad. Eagle Calf is a real chief of the old days, and his band is ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber

... Siberian pines swayed their boughs in his face; stones that lay in his path, unseen in the gloom, made him stumble. Now and then a large bird of the night flew by with a rushing sound: the air grew so cold that all Martinswand might have been turning to one huge glacier. All at once he heard through the stillness—for there is nothing so still as a mountain-side in snow—a little pitiful bleat. All his terrors vanished, all his memories of ghost-tales passed away; his heart gave a leap of joy; he was sure it ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various

... morning at least, the meal seemed a desecration, the sacrifice of an opportunity. Once before, I had a similar early morning experience; that was at Laggan, on the Canadian Pacific Railway, when, on awakening, I beheld directly opposite my window lovely Lake Louise and the beautiful glacier mirrored within the opalescent blue. This day in Japan ended with a glorious sunset, and, as the gold and azure melted away into nothingness, it was a fitful close to hours ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck

... Greenland Whale, and incidentally for the re-discovery of the Lost Icelandic Colonies of Old Greenland;" in this admirable volume, all standers of mast-heads are furnished with a charmingly circumstantial account of the then recently invented CROW'S-NEST of the Glacier, which was the name of Captain Sleet's good craft. He called it the SLEET'S CROW'S-NEST, in honour of himself; he being the original inventor and patentee, and free from all ridiculous false delicacy, and holding that if we ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville

... Ross Sea base, on the other side of the Pole, another party will push southward and will probably await the arrival of the Trans- continental party at the top of the Beardmore Glacier, near Mount Buckley, where the first seams of coal were discovered in the Antarctic. This region is of great importance to the geologist, who will be enabled to read much of the history of the Antarctic in ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton

... diagonally from summit to base, the broad surface of this side had the look of snow-white marble lace or fretwork. Passing thence to the north face, we came apparently upon the part at which the berg separated from its parent glacier. Here was a new effect, and one of great beauty. In material it resembled the finest statuary marble,—but rather the crystalline marbles of Vermont, with their brilliant half-sparkle, than the dead polish of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various

... himself. The Trinita de' Monti glittered in the deep blue sky, sharply outlined as if sculptured in faintly tinted marble. Rome, spread out beneath him, had a sheen as of crystal, like a city cut in a glacier. ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio

... of the second of June, just as we went over the schooner's side and shaped our course for our outer buoy, a bank of fog with an edge as perpendicular as the side of a house moved down on us like a great glacier, though much more rapidly, shutting us in and everything else out from sight. It was ugly and thick, as if all the fog factories from Grand Manan to Labrador had been working overtime for the two weeks ...
— Out of the Fog • C. K. Ober



Words linked to "Glacier" :   neve, Piedmont glacier, polar glacier, ice mass, Alpine glacier, Great Mendenhall Glacier, water ice, moraine, icefall, glacial



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