"Breast-deep" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... banks, built so as to protect the point of land. These are called the levees, and do perform their duty by keeping out the body of the waters. The shore between the banks is, I believe, never above breast-deep with the inundation; and from the circumstances of the place, and the soft, half-liquid nature of the soil, this inundation generally takes the shape of mud instead ...
— Volume 2 • Anthony Trollope
... cure-all plant among the mountains and valleys of the Blue Ridge. Together we toiled up steep heights so slippery with fallen autumn leaves that we had to catch every sapling and branch within our reach to save us from falling. We waded through gorges and chasms, breast-deep with laurel and ferns; we followed the banks of mountain streams for miles; we wound our way like Indians through brakes of pine—road side, hill side, river side, mountain side we explored in our search ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... him that pules and plains; With proud, averted face she stands To him that wooes with empty hands. Make thyself free of Manhood's guild; Pull down thy barns and greater build; The wood, the mountain, and the plain Wave breast-deep with the poet's grain; Pluck thou the sunset's fruit of gold, Glean from the heavens and ocean old; 140 From fireside lone and trampling street Let thy life garner daily wheat; The epic of a man rehearse, Be something better than thy verse; ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... horse charged over him, and again charged, and beat and were beaten three several times,—Anhalt-Dessau, impatient of such fiddling hither and thither, swashed into the stream itself with his Prussian Foot: swashed through it, waist-deep or breast-deep; and might have settled the matter, had not his cartridges got wetted. Old King Friedrich rebuked him angrily for his impetuosity in this matter, and the sad loss ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... broad sunlight and the wide savanna. Wading breast-deep in grass, they view the wavy sea of verdure, with headland and cape and far-reaching promontory, with distant coasts, hazy and dim, havens and shadowed coves, islands of the magnolia and the palm, high, impending shores of the mulberry ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... back; but a few strokes took him to the right side, where he snatched at some overhanging ferns rooted in the perpendicular wall of rock, checked himself for a few moments, and looked back, to see the four men, nearly breast-deep, a dozen yards behind, waiting for him to be swept down ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... though Texas had been for some years his adopted home. It was not the first time he had crossed the Rio Grande. He had been one of the unfortunate Mier expedition—a survivor of that decimated band—afterwards carried in chains to Mexico, and there compelled to work breast-deep in the mud of the great zancas that traverse the streets. Such experience might account for the serious, somewhat stern expression that habitually rested upon his countenance, and gave him the character of a "dark saturnine man." I have said incidentally that I never saw him smile— never. ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... Doctor as his athletic figure plowed forward through the breast-deep water. "That is their worst weapon and ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... Little Rockassel River runs round hits foot. That's what's a-stoppin' 'em. They'll hev a turrible time gittin' acrost hit. Hit's mouty hard crossin' at enny time, but hit's awful now, fur the Rockassel's boomin'. The big rains hev sent her up kitin', an' hit's now breast-deep thar in the Ford. We'll git round whar we kin ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... in which I seemed to float rather than walk—a celestial water, which, like the more ponderable and common sort, may sometimes be both felt and seen. The sensation of feeling it is somewhat similar to that experienced by a bather standing breast-deep in a dear, green, warm tropical sea, so charged with salt that it lifts him up; but to distinguish it with the eye, you must look away to a distance of some yards in an open unshaded place, when ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson |
