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adjective
Ebb  adj.  Receding; going out; falling; shallow; low. "The water there is otherwise very low and ebb."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Ebb" Quotes from Famous Books



... the ocean, the great tides ebb and flow. The waves which had once urged on the spirit of Ernest Maltravers to the rocks and shoals of active life had long since receded back upon the calm depths, and left the strand bare. With a melancholy and ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... very unexpected orders to leave Portsmouth. I must save the next tide, if possible. The ships will be ready, for you know what our navy can do when required: but as you know, I have not one atom of stock on board. The flood-tide has made almost an hour, and we must sail at the first of the ebb, as twelve hours' delay may be most serious. Now, tell me—here is the list of what is required; boats will be ready and men in plenty to get it on board;—can you get it ready by ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat

... swelling spread of live water it is, and safe, except, as one of my fellow-passengers informed me, for a rock off the Punta del Carnero, or Mutton Point. The rock is covered when the tide is high (for there is a tide here), but rears its tortoise-like back over the surface for some hours at the ebb. The Channel squadron was coming out of Gib some years before when an ironclad grounded on this rock, but was got off without more damage than a scraping. As the danger to the navigation was outside the limits of the fortress, the British authorities applied to the Spanish for permission ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea

... the graves of the deceased, for the use of the departed spirits. It was formerly the custom to put jars, weapons, clothes, food, and in some cases a female slave aboard a raft, and send it out to sea on the ebb tide "in order that the deceased might meet with these necessaries in his upward flight." Natives of Sarawak and British North Borneo, Vol. I, p. 145, (London, 1896). For notes on the funeral boat of the Kayan, see Hose and McDougall, Pagan Tribes ...
— Traditions of the Tinguian: A Study in Philippine Folk-Lore • Fay-Cooper Cole

... Senate was therefore disagreeably surprised when an envoy from Constantinople demanded the evacuation of Cyprus, and announced that the Sultan intended to exercise his full rights as sovereign of the island. The armaments of the Republic were at a low ebb, but Doge and Senate rejected the Ottoman demand, and defied the menace of ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale

... as the other first used the word; the tell-tale blood, which had begun to ebb towards her heart, rushing again tumultuously to her very temples; "surely not an ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper

... the shore was her schoolroom also. She learned to read from letters traced in the sand, and to make them herself with shells and pebbles. She did her sums that, way, too, after she had learned to count the sails in the harbor, the gulls feeding at ebb-tide, and the great granite blocks ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston

... The ebb and flow in the Thames had at last been turned to account, and worked huge turbines which perpetually stored up electric power that was used not only for lighting, but for cooking in hotels and private houses, and for driving machinery. At all the great centres of traffic huge electric suns cast ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith

... blight was studied at great length and at different seasons. Sometimes branches were inoculated with the fungus to test resistance more precisely. It was learned that blight resistance, in this group of trees, was at an apparently low ebb from March until May. After this period the fungus seemed to make almost no progress at all. This might suggest that the resistant substance was manufactured by the leaves. Of course, such conclusions cannot ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various

... writer, as one of the departing generation, would answer yes; but it is to the last that his attention, possibly by constitutional bias, is more naturally directed. It appears to him that in the ebb and flow of human affairs, under those mysterious impulses the origin of which is sought by some in a personal Providence, by some in laws not yet fully understood, we stand at the opening of a period when the question is to be settled decisively, though ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan

... roughened fragments were the only ones which had been completely absorbed—that the others had entered the whirl at so late a period of the tide, or, for some reason, had descended so slowly after entering, that they did not reach the bottom before the turn of the flood came, or of the ebb, as the case might be. I conceived it possible, in either instance, that they might thus be whirled up again to the level of the ocean, without undergoing the fate of those which had been drawn in more ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester

... indicating that the portion thus marked had never been properly surveyed. He was busily engaged as we entered laying down in pencil upon this chart certain corrections and remarks with reference to the ebb and flow of the ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood

... divorce from Blanche of Navarre, Henry sought and obtained the hand of Joanna, Princess of Portugal, whose ambition and unprincipled intrigues heightened the ill-favor with which he was already regarded. The court of Castile, once so famous for chastity and honor, sank to the lowest ebb of infamy, the shadow of which, seeming to extend over the whole land, affected nobles and people with its baleful influence. All law was at an end: the people, even while they murmured against the King, followed his evil example; and history shrinks from the scenes ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar

... another man (Edward Aymes) at Wahoo. He belonged to a boat's crew which was sent ashore for a load of sugar canes. By the time the boat was loaded by the natives the ebb of the tide had left her aground, and Aymes asked leave of the coxswain to take a stroll, engaging to be back for the flood. Leave was granted him, but during his absence, the tide haying come in sufficiently to float the boat, James Thorn, the coxswain, ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First American Settlement on the Pacific • Gabriel Franchere

... Newcastle District, Sept. 23rd, 1827.—I have now commenced my ministerial labours amongst strangers. Religion is at a low ebb among the people; but there are some who still hold fast their integrity, and are "asking the way to Zion with their faces thitherwards." I have preached twice to-day and been greatly assisted ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson

... occurred to-day: Chenopodium sp. occurs in fields at Roongdong. The terrace cultivation here had just yielded a crop of rice, and was now planted with wheat. Agriculture would appear to be at a low ebb, and if the country is populous, the people must ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith

... 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 ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald

... filled with big thrilling events. The ebb and flow of battle called into action all that was best and noblest in the boys, and my Lieutenant served his Battery and wrought deeds of valor to a degree all excelling and inspiring. I knew the secret of it all, it was the thought of ...
— The Greater Love • George T. McCarthy

... in a state of great dilapidation at the beginning of last century, and a great effort having been initiated by the then Archbishop, a fund was instituted to help the various parishes to restore their buildings. It was a period when architecture was at a low ebb, and the desire to sweep away antiquity was certainly strong, for those churches not rebuilt from the ground were so hacked and renovated that their interest and picturesqueness has vanished. The churches at Pickering, Middleton, ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home

... Sympathy appears, Yields Sigh for Sigh, and melts in equal Tears; For such Descriptions thus at once can prove The Force of Language, and the Sweets of Love. You sit like Heav'n's bright Minister on High, Command the throbbing Breast, and watry Eye, And, as our captive Spirits ebb and flow, Smile at the Tempests you have rais'd below: The Face of Guilt a Flush of Vertue wears, And sudden burst the involuntary Tears: Honour's sworn Foe, the Libertine with Shame, Descends to curse the sordid lawless Flame; The tender Maid here ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher

... case occurred as Parliament was drawing to a close in 1863, and at a time when Southern efforts were at low ebb. It was not, therefore, until some months later when a gentleman with a shady past, named Patrick Phinney, succeeded in evading British laws and in carrying off to America a group of Irishmen who found themselves, unwillingly, ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams

... seems to be a phase in which the production of equipped forces ceases through the using up of men or material or both. If the exhaustion is fairly mutual, it need not be decisive for a long time. It may mean simply an ebb of vigour on both sides, unusual hardship, a general social and economic disorganisation and grading down. The fact that a great killing off of men is implicit in the process, and that the survivors will be largely ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells

... to her, as there was nothing to be gained by waiting, she got up, and going into the hall, entered a dark coffee-room in which breakfast was served at its lowest ebb, black coffee, sugarless, and two ...
— The Happy Foreigner • Enid Bagnold

... item, until at the week's end a series of apparent nothings had swollen into the livelihood of near half a score of people. And nobody perceived how interesting it was, this interchange of activities, this ebb and flow of money, this sluggish rise and fall of reputations and fortunes, stretching out of one century into another and towards a third! Printing had been done at that corner, though not by steam, ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett

... made little change in the exterior of our block. It was situated at a point in the city from which the ebb tide of Fashion was slowly receding, and which the flood tide of Trade had not yet touched. There was not a new house on the block, or an old one materially altered. A little paint, and a diligent application of broom and Croton water, had kept the block ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton

... you won't have much of our company, because we shall hold on till we moor alongside the wharves of London; but if it's foul, or there is not enough of it to take us against tide, we have to anchor on the ebb, and then of course we ...
— By England's Aid • G. A. Henty

... {123e} That is, the ebb and influx of the tide represented the contrary aspects of his character, the mild and the impetuous, which are respectively described ...
— Y Gododin - A Poem on the Battle of Cattraeth • Aneurin

... 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 gentlemen, who carried due notice of their own importance on ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant

... mystics sometimes called the "discovery of God in His creatures." Not with some ecstatic adventure in supersensuous regions, but with the loving and patient exploration of the world that lies at your gates; the "ebb and flow and ever-during power" of which your own existence forms a part. You are to push back the self's barriers bit by bit, till at last all duration is included in the widening circles of its intuitive love: till you find in every manifestation ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill

... that rises along the shore seems as if it had strewed half its materials over the beach. The rugged blocks lie thick as stones in a causeway, down to the line of low ebb,—memorials of a time when the surf dashed against the shattered bases of the trap-hills, now elevated considerably beyond its reach; and we can catch but partial glimpses of the shale below. Wherever access to it ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller

... the general government was at a low ebb. Concerted action of a warlike nature on the part of the race was regarded as being out of the question, if for no other reason than that the Negro leaders were practically a unit in pronouncing such a course one of stupendous folly under the existing unequal conditions. Word was therefore ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs

... ebb. Only two clergymen accepted my offer to come and help hoe my potatoes for the privilege of using my vegetable total-depravity figure about the snake-grass, or quack-grass, as some call it; and those two did not bring hoes. There seems to be a lack of disposition ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various

... anticipate success, and for that very reason, Marian, I speak openly and plainly as I have spoken now. In my heart and my conscience I can say it, Laura's hopes for the future are at their lowest ebb. I know that her fortune is gone—I know that the last chance of restoring her to her place in the world lies at the mercy of her worst enemy, of a man who is now absolutely unassailable, and who may ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins

... tucked up out of the wet, leaving their gaunt roots exposed in midair." High-tide or low- tide, there is little difference in the water; the river, be it broad or narrow, deep or shallow, looks like a pathway of polished metal; for it is as heavy weighted with stinking mud as water e'er can be, ebb or flow, year out and year in. But the difference in the banks, though an unending alternation ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley

... when the tide is at its lowest ebb, so often when the wall of impossibility seems an insuperable mass of concrete, it is found to be the merest paper. As the Intelligence officer, awed by the great solitude of the sleeping veldt, stood musing on its fringe, a voice ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer

... for it. But his wiser spirit would not let him delude himself. Had he had a full stomach, and food in his pockets, he might, perhaps, safely have emulated this cunning trick of the partridge. But now, starving, weary, his vitality at the last ebb, he knew that if he should yield to the lure of the snow, he would be seen no more till the spring sun should reveal him, a thing of horror to the returning vireos and blackbirds, on the open, greening face of the barren. No, he would not burrow ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts

... dimming light told her the afternoon was waning, and then indications of darkness and another night of torture, despair filled her. Numb, hungry, her vitality at low ebb, she doubted her ability to weather it. Was she being punished, she wondered, for protesting against the life the Fates appeared to have mapped out for her? Was this futile inane end coming to her because since that day when ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart

... troubled. He knew in a remote sort of way that their finances were at a low ebb. Imogene always attended to ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby

... on the heights; had struggled and disputed. Two general rallies they made, and various partial, but none had any success. They were driven on, bayonet in back, as the phrase is: with this sad slap on their right, added to that old one on their left, what can they now do but ebb rapidly; pour in cataracts into Kingdom Wood, and disappear there? [ OEuvres de Frederic, iii. 135-143; Stille, pp. 144-163; Orlich, ii. 227-243; Feldzuge, i. 357, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... Hammersmith is in an ebb-tide district where once wealth and fashion held sway; but now the vicinity is given over to factories, tenement-houses and all that train of evil and vice that follows in ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard

... the tall masts quake and reel, And the oaken sea-burgs quiver from bulwark unto keel. It is Gunnar goes the foremost with the tiller in his hand, And beside him standeth Knefrud and laughs on Atli's land: And so fair are the dragons driven, that by ending of the day On the beach by the ebb left naked the sea-beat keels they lay: Then they look aloft from the foreshore, and lo, King Atli's steeds On the brow of the mirk-wood standing, well dight for the warriors' needs, The red and the roan together, and the dapple-grey and the black; Nor bits nor silken ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris

... the whole of the 18th in beating up towards Hammerfest. In the evening a Lapland boat came on board, and one of the men undertook to pilot the ship to the anchorage, which, after beating all night against an ebb tide, we reached at three A.M. on the 19th. Finding that our reindeer had not arrived, I immediately despatched Lieutenant Crozier, in one of our own boats, to Alten, from whence they were expected—a distance of about sixty English miles. At the same time, we ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry

... of war had ebb'd away From Trachis and Thermopylae, Long centuries had come and gone Since that fierce day ...
— A Treasury of War Poetry - British and American Poems of the World War 1914-1917 • Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by George Herbert Clarke

... meet the lost. It is not born of the bible. The idea of immortality, like the great sea, has ebbed and flowed in the human heart, beating with its countless waves against the rocks and sands of fate and time. It was not born of the bible. It was born of the human heart, and it will continue to ebb and flow beneath the mists and clouds of doubt and darkness as long as love kisses the lips of death. We do not know. We do not prophesy a life of pain. We leave the dead with nature, the mother of us ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll

... for the facts of the Christian life are such as to demand, both by its greatness and by its littleness, by its loftiness and by its lapses into lowliness, by the floodtide of devotion that sometimes sweeps rejoicingly over the mud-shoals and by the ebb that sometimes leaves them all black and festering, a future life wherein what was manifestly meant to be, and capable of being, dominant, supreme, but was hampered and hindered here, shall reach its full development, and where the plant that was dwarfed in this alien soil, transplanted into ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren

... weighed to run through the north passage; in doing which she grounded on a rock lying directly in the channel, and having only thirteen feet upon it at low water, which our sounding boats had missed, and of which the pilot was ignorant. The tide being that of ebb we were unable to heave the ship off immediately, and at low water she had sewed three feet forward. It was not till half-past one P.M., that she floated, when it became necessary to drop her down between the rock and the shore ...
— Journal of the Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage • William Edward Parry

... mules whose braying mingles with the pastoral music of reeds and bagpipes—bagpipes of two kinds, the common Calabrian variety and that of Basilicata, much larger and with a resounding base key, which will soon cease to exist. A heaving ebb and flow of humanity fills the eye; fires are flickering before extempore shelters, and an ungodly amount of food is being consumed, as traditionally prescribed for such occasions—"si mangia per divozione." ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas

... 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

... that the ebb-tide was causing huge combing rollers that might dash the ship against the rocks. Rushing below decks he besought Bering's permission to sound and anchor. The early darkness of those northern latitudes had been followed by moon-light bright as day. Within a mile of the east shore, ...
— Vikings of the Pacific - The Adventures of the Explorers who Came from the West, Eastward • Agnes C. Laut

... manner have been so completely refuted. Unmoved by the storm of calumny and detraction which raged around him, he has calmly and silently awaited the unerring judgment, the triumphant verdict, which he knew time and the ebb of the bad passions his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various

... payments of his fees to Tilney, in connection with his new venture, begin at that time. Henslowe became the financial backer of this company in 1591, at which time, it shall be shown, later on, that James Burbage's fortunes were at a low ebb, and that he also was in disfavour with the authorities. Henslowe evidently was brought into the affair by Tilney's influence, the office of Groom of the Privy Chamber being a reward for his compliance. It shall be indicated that Tilney and Henslowe ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson

... felt at rather low ebb that he passed, rather disconsolately, the Flat Iron Building and remembered Martin. Having no other place to go, he decided to call upon that shrewd gentleman and gather from such a source of hard common sense fresh courage. He turned ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton

... Giovanni e Paolo, in the heart of Venice. There, in the dim quietness of the old church, they lie at rest together, undisturbed by the voices of the passers-by in the square outside, or the lapping of the water against the steps, as the tides ebb and ...
— Knights of Art - Stories of the Italian Painters • Amy Steedman

... hunted them away, when he came down to his own districts, just before the capture of his wife and son. He filled the Tower of Buchan with his own creatures, scattered the Comyns all over the land, with express commands to attack, hunt, or resist all of the name of Bruce to the last ebb of their existence. He left amongst them officers and knights as traitorous, and spirits well-nigh as evil as his own, and they obeyed him to the letter, for amongst the most inveterate, the most treacherous, and most dishonorable persecutors of the Bruce stood first and foremost the Comyns ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar

... matter; but nothing like it is seen in London. In France, it is the pressure of the moon that causes the tides; but in England it is the sea that gravitates towards the moon; so that when you think that the moon should make it flood with us, those gentlemen fancy it should be ebb, which very unluckily cannot be proved. For to be able to do this, it is necessary the moon and the tides should have been inquired into at the very instant ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire

... Steady! Watch for a smooth! Give way! If she feels the lop already She'll stand on her head in the bay. It's ebb—it's dusk—it's blowing. The shoals are a mile of white. But (snatch her along!) we're going To find our ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling

... and Babylon; between the first making, and the final breaking. The national tide ebbed very low twice, before it finally ran out in the Euphrates Valley. Elijah stemmed the tide the second time, and saved the day for a later night. The Hannah story belongs in the first of these ebb-tides; the first bad sag; the ...
— Quiet Talks on Prayer • S. D. (Samuel Dickey) Gordon

... to burn and empale heretics. There are still many divinity professors who think it right to kill heretics and infidels. The society of the nineteenth century is still eaten up by the most rancorous bigotry, and morality is proportionably at a low ebb. Nevertheless, with all our present Desert hardships, we are an easy journeying caravan; the patience of no one is particularly tried, and there is no event to draw out the real passions of the soul. We are now five days from Ghat; to-morrow being the Ayed Kebir, ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson

... the "evangelical" churches been fundamentally affected by the prevailing intellectual currents of the day. This is due, I think, to two causes. One was the nature of the German Reformation. It found preaching at a low ebb. Every great force, scholastic, popular, mystical, which had contributed to the splendor of the mediaeval pulpit had fallen into decay, and the widespread moral laxity of the clergy precluded spiritual insight. The Reformation, with its ethical and political interests, revived preaching and ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch

... I'm tellin' the truth, anyway. You see," she continued, "most people think piety's at a low ebb unless we're gettin' up some kind of a holy show all the time, to bring people together that wouldn't meet anywhere else if they saw each other first. Then when they've bought a chance on a pieced bed-quilt, or paid for chicken-pie at a church supper, ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott

... learning it,—making love to her. I wonder whether she would let me and like it. It is an absurd thing, and I ought not to confess, but I tell you and you only, Beloved, my heart gave a perceptible jump when it heard the whisper of that possibility overhead! Every day has its ebb and flow, but such a thought as that is like one of those tidal waves they talk about, that rolls in like a great wall and overtops and drowns out all your landmarks, and you, too, if you don't mind what you are about and stand ready to run ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... each hill was prolonged to a point by the tapering minaret of one of those Abadite mosques which the girl thought the most Eastern of all things imported from the East. The oasis which gave wealth to the M'Zabites surged round the towns like a green sea at ebb tide, sucked back from a strand of gold; and as the caravan wound down the wonderful road with which the Beni-M'Zab had traced the sheer side of their enchanted cup, the groaning of hundreds of well-chains came plaintively up ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... circumstance to 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 four 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 4 a.m., than at any other period during the cycle of ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer

... glad to see you, I'm sure. Friends who look you up in the low ebb of the hours before breakfast are friends indeed. Come along up, both of you, and tell me ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner

... month of February, I came ashore at the wharf at dusk. I had pulled down as far as Greenwich with the ebb tide, and had turned with the tide. It had been a fine bright day, but had become foggy as the sun dropped, and I had had to feel my way back among the shipping, pretty carefully. Both in going and returning, I had seen the signal in ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens

... hide, your clothes thrashing abroad from underneath their guardian stone, the froth of the great breakers casting you headlong ere it had drowned your knees. Or you might explore the tidal rocks, above all in the ebb of springs, when the very roots of the hills were for the nonce discovered; following my leader from one group to another, groping in slippery tangle for the wreck of ships, wading in pools after the abominable creatures of the sea, and ever with an eye cast ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson

... and then cranked through the hawse-holes as the hands rose and fell at the brakes. The anchor came home, dripping gray slime. A nor'west wind filled the schooner's sails, a strong ebb ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris

... Infantry from San Francisco to Stockton, we got up to our destination at little cost. I recall an occurrence that happened when the schooner was anchored in Carquinez Straits, opposite the soldiers' camp on shore. We were waiting for daylight and a fair wind; the schooner lay anchored at an ebb-tide, and about daylight Ord and I had gone ashore for something. Just as we were pulling off from shore, we heard the loud shouts of the men, and saw them all running down toward the water. Our attention thus drawn, ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan

... that natural succession of extremes which seems to be a governing law of nature (as the flow the ebb, the calm the storm, day the night, etc.), was not less elated than she had been depressed in the early part of the day,—but still, I take it, in a nervous, excitable condition. And hearing her father, ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett

... their profit, but for the public convenience, and all Republicans can agree that that right should never be permitted to exist except when it is for the public convenience. The office of bank notes is simply to supply the ebb and flow of currency made necessary by the wants of business. The United States cannot lend United States notes, and therefore cannot meet this want. Ewing proposes to destroy the whole national bank system, interwoven ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman

... ground. He had not been idle for a single day, but he had been unwise, an intellectual spendthrift, living in a continuous succession of enthusiasms, and now at the critical moment his stock of nerve and energy was at a low ebb. He went in depressed and tired, his friends watching anxiously for the result. On the day of the Logic paper, as he emerged into the Schools quadrangle, he felt his arm ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... ways, and with her knowledge of this her contempt for the man increased. As she leaned her head on her hand, a fleeting vision of her own girlhood, with its mournful climacteric and tragic ebb, was vouchsafed her, and for the moment she was minded to read him a lesson from it. God! it must be less than human brute who could not be held by such a tale, told as she could tell it, but—bah! He was not worth it, ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London

... upwards by the Revolution, with here {241} and there a surviving aristocrat, like the widow of Beauharnais, needy, and turning to the new sun to relieve her distress. Among them morality was at the lowest ebb. For the old sacrament of marriage had been virtually demolished by law; civil marriage and divorce had been introduced, and in the governing classes, so much affected in family life and fortune by the reign of terror, the step between civil marriage and what was no marriage at ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston

... what candid person does not feel that each and all of these contained exaggerations more incredible than the difficulties which they sought to remove? There has been on each of the points raised a more or less definite ebb in the tide. The moderate conclusion is seen to be also the reasonable conclusion. And not least is this the case with the enquiry on which we have been just engaged. The author of 'Supernatural Religion' has overshot the mark ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday

... was shorter than expected. The tide suddenly ceased to run ebb and began to come in. The reason was an ominous one. The wind had hauled squarely into the north and increased its velocity to forty miles an hour and each moment the cold grew more terrible. Stuart found the little boat afloat on the flood tide, jumped ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon

... disturb the money-market, affect many speculative adventures and operations when at the very moment credit may be most needed. It is absolutely necessary that I should be daily at my post on the Bourse, and hourly watch the ebb and flow of events. Under these circumstances I had counted, permit me to count still, on your presence in Bretagne. We have already begun negotiations on a somewhat extensive scale, whether as regards the improvement of forests and orchards, or the plans for building ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... in my favour, and brought me back more than I had lost. I continued playing with a heap of gold before me, and on my putting a fistfull of sequins on a card it came out, and I went paroli and pair de paroli. I won again, and seeing that the bank was at a low ebb I stopped playing. Canano paid me, and told his cashier to get a thousand sequins, and as he was shuffling the cards I heard a cry of, ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... husband his ground so well if he sit at a great rent, so the merchant can not drive his trade so well, if he sit at great usury. The third is incident to the other two; and that is the decay of customs of kings or states, which ebb or flow with merchandising. The fourth that it bringeth the wealth or treasure of a realm or state into ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott

... lighted it with slightly trembling fingers. He grumbled inarticulately, remembering his own exploits in the carrying of sail and record runs under the bluff bows of the Honorable John Company itself. The ebb tide, he thought, returning to William's figure and its amplification by himself. So much that had been good sweeping out to sea never to return....Gerrit ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer

... have had, Dmitri, what a cruel time! How can people outlive those they love? I knew beforehand what Andrei Petrovitch would say to me every day, I did really; my life seemed to ebb and flow with ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev

... the greatest difficulty. Ah! I can close my eyes and see the place where I slept that first night I came to Paris. I was so exhausted that I did not awake for twelve hours. I ordered a good breakfast; and finding funds at a very low ebb, I started ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau

... Albinus, unjustly accused of treason, led to his imprisonment at Pavia[279] and his execution in 524.[280] Not many generations after his death, the period being one in which historical criticism was at its lowest ebb, the church found it profitable to look upon his execution as a martyrdom.[281] He was {72} accordingly looked upon as a saint,[282] his bones were enshrined,[283] and as a natural consequence his books ...
— The Hindu-Arabic Numerals • David Eugene Smith

... of former monarchs of the forest that filled its bed—a ditch covered with a superstratum of slimy, green water, lank weeds, and rank vegetation; and wherein, at flood time, urchin anglers could fish for eels and sticklebats, and, at ebb, the village ducks disport themselves ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson

... world is so heavily taxed in proportion to its resources and population. Great ignorance is still the misfortune of Italy, especially in the central and southern provinces. Education is at a low ebb, and only a small part of the population can even read and write, except in Piedmont. The spiritual despotism of the Pope still enslaves the bulk of the people, who are either Roman Catholics with mediaeval superstitions, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord

... be added in its turn to the list of abandoned endeavors. Insensibly the sceptre passes.... Nearer home than any of these places have I imagined the same thing; in Paris it seemed to me I felt the first chill shadow of that same arrest, that impalpable ebb and cessation at the very crest of things, that voice which opposes to all the hasty ambitions and gathering eagerness of men: "It is not here, ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells

... with its usual midnight throng; there was the hubbub of loud voices and the ebb and flow of laughter. From midway of the gambling-hall rose the noisy exhortations of some amateur gamester who was breathing upon his dice and pleading earnestly, feelingly, with "Little Joe"; from the theater issued the strains of a sentimental ballad. As Rouletta and her companion edged their ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach

... with the famous burial-cavern near Ycod, on the northern coast; this would give a tunnel 8 miles long and 11,040 feet high. Many declare that the meltings ebb and flow with the sea-tide, and others recount that lead and lines of many fathoms failed to touch bottom. We are told about the normal dog which fell in and found its way to the shore through the cave of Ycod ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton

... and hearsay evidence would have been the best he could command. At the time when Scarry had been prevalent in the mining camps thereabout—when, as the editor of the Hurdy Herald would have phrased it, she was "in the plenitude of her power"—Mr. Doman's fortunes had been at a low ebb, and he had led the vagrantly laborious life of a prospector. His time had been mostly spent in the mountains, now with one companion, now with another. It was from the admiring recitals of these casual partners, fresh from the various camps, that his judgment of Scarry had been ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce

... disappointed to find that strangers were forbidden by law to hold public meetings, or preach in the assemblies of the Protestants; and although they met with many pious individuals, they thought the life of religion on the whole at a low ebb, and deplored the prevalence of the forms and ceremonies used by the Church, of England. The schools, too, they found to be in a very poor state; the masters deficient in education and badly paid, and the schools conducted without system. The ministers showed them great kindness, and on their ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley

... 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

... be at their lowest ebb, Andy was discovered to be the rightful heir to the Scatterbrain title and estates, his claims to which were set forth in the second of the two letters stolen from the post-office, which had been destroyed by the squire without his ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various

... on, the life-blood seemed to ebb away from Ursula, and within the emptiness a heavy despair gathered. Her passion seemed to bleed to death, and there was nothing. She sat suspended in a state of complete nullity, harder to ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence

... they were lying a little way off the mouth of a river not right great; so they put out their boats and towed the ship up into the said river, and when they had gone up it for a mile or thereabouts they found the sea water failed, for little was the ebb and flow of the tide on that coast. Then was the river deep and clear, running between smooth grassy land like to meadows. Also on their left board they saw presently three head of neat cattle going, as ...
— The Wood Beyond the World • William Morris

... distant from it about a mile and a half. The Dick being a little to leeward of our track, had four fathoms; but the least we had was five and three-quarters. This reef is not noticed in Captain Flinders' chart: at high water, or even at half ebb, it is very dangerous, from its lying in the direct track; but, by hauling over to the south shore, ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King

... Rabbits themselves were the extreme case, millions in 1904, none at all in 1907. The present, then, was a year of low ebb. The first task was to determine whether this related to all mammalian life. Apparently not, because Deermice, Lynxes, Beaver, and Caribou were abundant. Yet these are not their maximum years; the accounts show them to have ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton

... his hand across his forehead; he was so tired. He pushed the manuscript and letters into a drawer of the desk, and turning the key upon them, opened the window and stepped out into the air. His vitality was at as low an ebb as if from physical overwork and fasting. He made no attempt to think, or to comment on the events just past. For the moment they lost their interest, and he strolled aimlessly about the park, his exhausted forces slowly recuperating. At the ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... treaties so lately and so solemnly concluded, was a very bold one to be made to people, whatever their inclinations might be, whom the war had reduced to the lowest ebb of riches and power. They would not hear of a direct and open engagement, such as the sending a body of troops would have been; neither would they grant the whole of what was asked in the second plan. But it was impossible for them, or any ...
— Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope • Lord Bolingbroke

... the twelfth was clear and calm, with no light but that of the stars. Within two hours before daybreak thirty boats, crowded with sixteen hundred soldiers, cast off from the vessels and floated downward in perfect order with the current of the ebb-tide. To the boundless joy of the army, Wolfe's malady had abated, and he was able to command in person. His ruined health, the gloomy prospect of the siege, and the disaster at Montmorenci, had oppressed him with the deepest ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various

... more respectful heed to voices like this voice of the lonely Genevese thinker—with its pathetic alterations of hope and fear, and the moral steadfastness which is the inmost note of it—to these meditative lives, which, through all the ebb and flow of thought, and in the dim ways of doubt and suffering, rich in knowledge, and yet rich in faith, grasp in new forms, and proclaim to ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... him in his natural shrinking from his task, she was satisfied that he could not now retreat if he would do what duty plainly called him to. So they trotted or cantered leisurely along, while the dashing of the waves, and their ceaseless ebb and flow, seemed to remind them of that love which, in the midst of the ceaseless ebb and flow of this world's trials, and of man's personal failures and advances in the life of holiness, ever comes, ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson

... agitation with which he had been long familiar. He felt in himself an ebb and flow as of some strange power. A kind of marvellous energy, gathered by some means known to himself alone, issued slowly from him. A mysterious current passed between himself and the grave where the boy who had departed from life lay in the throes of death-sleep; ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub

... travelers to leave early in the morning, and make a circuit of the island, for a possible sight of the refugees, was not destined to be carried out. For somewhere around two o'clock, when bodily functions are said to be at their lowest ebb, Walter heard ...
— The Motor Girls on Waters Blue - Or The Strange Cruise of The Tartar • Margaret Penrose

... harbours facing the two entrances of the Euripus. It would be difficult to find a station more dangerous for shipping; for not only do the winds come down with great violence from the high mountains on each side, but the strait itself of the Euripus does not ebb and flow seven times a day at stated times, as is reported, but the current changing irregularly, like the wind, now this way now that, is hurried along like a torrent rolling headlong down a steep mountain, so that no quiet is given to vessels there day or night. But not only did ...
— History of Rome, Vol III • Titus Livius

... continued, "there is, I suppose, no department of affairs which one is more inclined to criticise than this. And yet the more one investigates the more one discovers, even here, the harmony and necessity that pervade the whole universe. The ebb and flow of business from this trade or country to that, the rise and fall of wages, or of the rate of interest, the pouring of capital into or out of one industry or another, the varying relations of imports to exports, the periods of depression and ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson

... but eventually escaped from his persecutors. Pretended plots were rumoured in all directions, and numbers of innocent persons were executed. William Burke was hanged in Galway, and forty-five persons were executed. The Geraldine cause was reduced to the lowest ebb by the treachery of Jose. The Earl of Desmond and his sons were fugitives in their own country. The latter was offered pardon if he would surrender Dr. Saunders, the Papal Legate, but this he resolutely refused. Saunders continued his spiritual ministrations until he was entirely ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack

... there was ever something to attract him. He might see sword-playing at Hockley, or cocking at Shoe Lane, or baiting at Southwark, or shooting at Tothill Fields. Again, he might walk in the physic gardens of St. James's, or go down the river with the ebb tide to the cherry orchards at Rotherhithe, or drive to Islington to drink the cream, or, above all, walk in the Park, which is most modish for a gentleman who dresses in the fashion. You see, Clarke, that we were active in our idleness, ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle

... or three trips between Wilmington and Nassau during the winter of 1862-3 encountering no extraordinary hazards. During one of them we arrived within ten or twelve miles of the western bar too early in the night to cross it, as the ebb tide was still running; and it was always my custom to cross the bar on a rising tide, if possible. All the usual preparations had been made on board for running through the fleet, and as no sail was in sight we steamed cautiously in toward the land until we ...
— The Narrative of a Blockade-Runner • John Wilkinson

... if shot. From behind the wreck a small boat shot out into the moon's brilliance. Two figures sat in it, a woman and a man; and as the boat dropped swiftly down on the ebb he had time to notice that both were heavily muffled about the face. This was all he could see, for in a moment they had passed into the gloom, and the next the angle of the house hid them from ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... live forever on their shelves. But let us grant for the sake of argument that any decline of contemporary poets is bound to effect poetry-lovers in some mysteriously disastrous way. And let us recall the situation back there in the seventies when the ebb of poetic appreciation first set in. At that time Whittier, Holmes, Emerson, and Whitman had only just topped the crest of the hill of accomplishment, and the last-named was as yet no more generally known than was the rare genius of the young Lanier. Longfellow, who remains even to-day the most ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler

... gentles, will you never wait your turn?" he rumbled in a deep angry voice. "Can you not see that we are warping the Rose of Guienne into midstream for the ebb-tide? Is this a time to break in upon us? Your goods will go aboard in due season, I promise you; so ride back into the town and find such pleasure as you may, while I and my mates do our ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle

... in his admirable account of the coral formations of the Pacific and Indian oceans, has propounded a theory as to the abundance of fresh water in the atolls and islands on coral reefs, furnished by wells which ebb and flow with the tides. Assuming it to be impossible to separate salt from sea water by filtration, he suggests that the porous coral rock being permeated by salt water, the rain which falls on the surface must sink to the level of the surrounding sea, "and must accumulate there, ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent

... the little altar. The case was filled with tiny images of gold—milagros. Each had received priestly blessing, and each was believed to have worked a miraculous cure. The relaxed lines of the priest's care-worn face instantly drew into an expression of hard austerity. Like the ebb of the ocean, his recalcitrant thought surged back again in a ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... or impressiveness. He had just to die, and he devoted his swift energies to it, as he had done to living. I never saw him so splendid and noble as he was at that last awful moment. Life did not ebb away, but he seemed to fling it from him, so that it was not as the death of a weary man sinking to rest, but like the eager transit of a soldier to ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson

... not tell whether or not this was the forerunner of a heavy attack, for our Cossack posts were responding briskly. It was about three o'clock in the morning, at which time men's courage is said to be at the lowest ebb; but the cavalry division was certainly free from any weakness in that direction. At the alarm everybody jumped to his feet and the stiff, shivering, haggard men, their eyes only half-opened, all clutched ...
— Rough Riders • Theodore Roosevelt

... memorandum of the hiding-place. And here it is! Lord save us, Mr. Franklin, here is the secret that puzzled everybody, from the great Cuff downwards, ready and waiting, as one may say, to show itself to YOU! It's the ebb now, sir, as anybody may see for themselves. How long will it be till the turn of the tide?" He looked up, and observed a lad at work, at some little distance from us, mending a net. "Tammie Bright!" he shouted at ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins

... firing, and dispersed about the neighborhood, butchering cattle and burning the church and a few empty houses. As the tide began to ebb, they sent a fire-raft in full blaze down the creek to destroy the sloops; but it stranded, and the attempt failed. They now wreaked their fury on the prisoner Diamond, whom they tortured to death, after ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman

... unimportant in itself, is memorable as being the first occasion upon which the mutineers and the British troops met. Hitherto the Sepoys had had it entirely their own way. Mutiny, havoc, murder, had gone on unchecked; but now the tide was to turn, never to ebb again until the Sepoy mutiny was drowned in a sea of blood. Upon this, their first meeting with the white troops, the Sepoys were confident of success. They were greatly superior in force; they had been carefully drilled in the English system; they were led by their ...
— In Times of Peril • G. A. Henty

... dispirited and weary, he had managed to pick up a living as best he could, gradually forsaking more ambitious instruments for his barrel-organ, till the tide of life, gradually running low, was reduced to its lowest ebb by the shock of his daughter's death, superadded to the decline which had long ...
— Lucy Raymond - Or, The Children's Watchword • Agnes Maule Machar

... crisped and crowded waves that flicker and dance before the strong winds upon the unlifted level of the shallow sea. But the scene is widely different at low tide. A fall of eighteen or twenty inches is enough to show ground over the greater part of the lagoon; and at the complete ebb the city is seen standing in the midst of a dark plain of seaweed, of gloomy green, except only where the larger branches of the Brenta and its associated streams converge towards the port of the Lido. Through this salt and sombre plain the gondola and the fishing-boat ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin

... to be at a low ebb where there is but little knowledge of, or interest in, the history of its past. I was recently impressed with this in visiting a small inland community, which was not without many events of interest ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson

... panting cry of man's desire, That waileth upward in hoarse discontent, And here to list but to that liquid voice That riseth in the spirit, and whose flow Is like a rivulet from Paradise— To hear the wanderings of divine thought Within the soul, like the low ebb and flow Of waters in the blue-deep ocean caves, Forming itself a speech and melody Sweeter than words unto the aching sense— To stand alone with Nature where man's step Hath never bowed a grass-blade 'neath its ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels

... the tide did what the river would not, and came and covered me over, and my soul had rest in the green water, and rejoiced and believed that it had the Burial of the Sea. But with the ebb the water fell again, and left me alone again with the callous mud among the forgotten things that drift no more, and with the sight of all those desolate houses, and with the knowledge among all of us that each ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]

... for the myriad influences in the ebb and flow of immigration that carry the impulses, the ideals, and the new life of America into the heart of ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen

... stretch. But for most of us the way to the war lay through a stranger region than that. Years ago (as it seems) on a rainy winter evening, we watched the buoys of the Solent Channel streaming past us all aslope on the strong ebb-tide, and as the Trinity Brothers began to open their eyes for an all-night watch on the south coast, we closed ours to the ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young

... and apparently lost. He had mistaken the turn of the flood for the turn of the ebb. His dealings had been so extensive that settlement could not long be postponed, and to settle he was obliged to sell off corn that he had bought only a few weeks before at figures higher by many shillings a quarter. Much of the corn he had never seen; it ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy

... passage at the close of the 'Roundabout Paper' No. 23, 'De Finibus,' in which a sense of the ebb of life is very marked; the whole paper is like a soliloquy. It opens with a drawing of Mr. Punch, with unusually mild eye, retiring for the night; he is putting out his high-heeled shoes, and before disappearing gives a wistful look into the passage, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various

... and "when?" and "how?" were the burden of the child's eager speech. Nothing seemed to have escaped her quick ears or eyes, no natural phenomena of the open; life, birth, movement, growth, the flow, and ebb of tides, thunder pealing from high-piled clouds, the sun shining through fragrant falling rain, mists that grew ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers

... 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 with His creatures when they please. ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne

... city-tide was at its flood and began to ebb. Life runs in Piccadilly Circus, say, from nine to one, and then, there also, ebbs into the small hours of the echoing policeman and the lamps and stars. But the Toll House is far up stream, and near its rural springs; the bubble ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... superiority 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 laid low so many of the observation ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott

... the soul. When our Founders declared a new order of the ages; when soldiers died in wave upon wave for a union based on liberty; when citizens marched in peaceful outrage under the banner "Freedom Now"—they were acting on an ancient hope that is meant to be fulfilled. History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the Author ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various

... ebb and flow are the restless tides of politics! These scenes of grandeur and glory soon dissolved from my view like a dream. I "saved the country" for only two short years. My competitor proved a lively corpse. He burst forth from the tomb like a ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor

... the upper part of the city. The principal lines pass from Broadway into Madison, Fourth and Fifth avenues, and along their upper portions traverse the best quarter of the city. As the stages furnish the only conveyances on Broadway, they generally do well. The flow and ebb of the great tide down and up the island in the morning and evening crowd every vehicle, and during the remainder of the day, they manage by the exertions of the ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe

... to his coronation; he visits the captive king in prison, and shames the desertion of the great. The political incident of the deposition is sketched with extraordinary knowledge of the world;—the ebb of fortune, on the one hand, and on the other, the swelling tide, which carries every thing along with it. While Bolingbroke acts as a king, and his adherents behave towards him as if he really were so, he still continues to give out that he has come with an armed band merely ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel

... a feeble hold on him, how much more uncertain was his grasp on literature. He had thrown his line, he had been encouraged by nibbles, but publishers were too wary to take hold. It seemed to him that he had literally cast his bread upon the waters, and apparently at an ebb tide, and his venture had gone to the fathomless sea. He had put his heart into the story, and, more than that, his hope of something dearer than any public favor. As he went over the story in his mind, scene after scene, and dwelt upon the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... majority of the bishops, writhing under the inhibitions, looked on in sullen acquiescence, submitting in a forced conformity, and believing, not without cause, that a tide which flowed so hotly would before long turn and ebb back again. Among the Reforming clergy there was neither union nor prudence; and the Protestants, in the sudden sunshine, were becoming unmanageable and extravagant. On the bench there were but four prelates who were on the moving side,—Cranmer, Latimer, Shaxton, and Barlow,[528]—and ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude

... floundered, splashed, and flurried into deep water, while the awestruck individual with the rifle was too astounded to fire a shot. He may tell, too, of another instance of good luck on the part of the crocodile. How, drifting down silently with the ebb, the black boy indicated the presence of game on a slide overhung by a deep verandah of mud; how a shot was fired and a big log splashed into the water and the little one remained bearing the bullet-wound, the real having been too big and ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield

... to leave Russia altogether. The same lack of completeness marked the pogroms which took place simultaneously in several other cities within the jurisdiction of the governor-general of New Russia. In the beginning of May the destructive energy characterizing the first pogrom period began to ebb. A lull ensued in the "military operations" of the Russian barbarians which continued until the month of July of ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow

... But ye were speaking o' her grave? Lord help us, it's no an ordinar grave that will haud her in, if a's true that folk said of Alice in her auld days; and if I gae to six feet deep—and a warlock's grave shouldna be an inch mair ebb, or her ain witch cummers would soon whirl her out of her shroud for a' their auld acquaintance—and be't six feet, or be't three, wha's to pay the making o't, ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott

... evidences of thriftless dependence as in this city before the cold breath of the North swept down here during the rebellion and imparted a little of 'Yankee' vigor to its business and population? Where within the bounds of professed fidelity to the Government was true loyalty at a lower ebb, and sympathy with the rebellion at higher flood; freedom more hated, and emancipation more roundly denounced; white troops harder to raise, and black ones more heartily despised; Union victories more coldly received, ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes

... ready to wash it out of existence. But sand-banks grow when the conditions favor; and weak as reason is, it has this unique advantage over its antagonists that its activity never lets up and that it presses always in one direction, while men's prejudices vary, their passions ebb and flow, and their excitements are intermittent. Our sand-bank, I absolutely believe, is bound to grow. Bit by bit it will get dyked and breakwatered. But sitting as we do in this warm room, with music and ...
— Memories and Studies • William James

... sun half an hour high; A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them, Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood-tide, the falling-back to the sea of the ebb-tide. It avails not, neither time nor place—distance avails not; I am with you—you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence; I project myself—also I return—I am with you, and know how ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman

... that is without end. They arouse those deep and lasting emotions which grow out of the recognition of elemental and universal tragedy. His aim is not merely to tell a tale; his aim is to show the vast ebb and flow of forces which sway and condition human destiny. One cannot imagine him consenting to Conan Doyle's statement of the purpose of fiction, quoted with characteristic approval by the New York Times: "to amuse mankind, to help the sick and the dull and the weary." ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken

... weary months did the people hear its summons. Swedish manhood was at its lowest ebb. Stockholm was held by the widow of Sten Sture with a half-famished garrison. In Kalmar another woman, Anna Bjelke, commanded, but her men murmured, and the fall of the fortress was imminent. When Gustav Vasa, who had slipped in unseen, exhorted them to stand fast, they would ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis

... "When a man vanishes in that sudden way his body is generally found in a clump of blackberry bushes, months afterwards, or left somewhere on the flats by an ebb tide." ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... the joyful people of Charleston return to their homes. The stars look down upon the lapping waters of the bay, where ride at anchor the shadowy vessels of the British fleet. Towards midnight, when the tide begins to ebb, the battered war ships slip their cables and sail out into the ...
— Hero Stories from American History - For Elementary Schools • Albert F. Blaisdell

... could give things, and he gave a great deal to the poor that came to the house, so that his stock of cash was at a low ebb. ...
— The Book of One Syllable • Esther Bakewell



Words linked to "Ebb" :   reflux, tide, diminution, circumvent, besiege, ebb out, surround, beleaguer, ebbtide, recede, wane, flow, ebbing, hem in, decline, fall back, ebb away



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