"Swathe" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Ragged Men were cut literally to bits before the storm of bullets began to do real damage. The squabbling group, casting lots for Evelyn, had a swathe of dead men in its midst before snarls ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... already turning the corner of the rue de la Lune when Neeland managed to free throat and eyes from the swathe ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... cabbages. Anything, in short, but work. Sometimes, however, he takes the trap and horse, and is supposed to be gone on a dealing expedition. Sometimes it is only to carry a jar of beer up to the men in the field, and to mouch a good armful of fresh-cut clover for provender from the swathe. He sips gin the live-long day—weak gin always—every hour from morn till a cruel Legislature compels the closing of the shutters. He is never intoxicated—it is simply a habit, a sort of fuel to feed the low cunning in which his soul delights. ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... length of serge she gave him and with characteristic indifference to danger stooped over the dog, whose spirit he admired, and tried to swathe his head in its heavy folds. But, torn, blinded, baffled, the Dane was undefeated. He wrenched his jaws out of their mufflings and rolled his head from side to side, snapping right and left. "Oh Billy," cried ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... he thoughts to genius only known, When nought was heard around But sooth'd the rest profound Of rural beauty on her mountain throne. Nor less he lov'd (rude nature's child) The elemental conflict wild; When, fold on fold, above was pil'd The watery swathe, careering on the wind. Such scenes he saw With solemn awe, As in the presence of the Eternal Mind. Fix'd he gaz'd, Tranc'd and rais'd, Sublimely rapt ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... you think there is nothing between him and the bleakness of immensity, between him and utter abasement, but a few tattered rags and a feeble musculature. And all unseen by you a host of heaven-sent fatuities swathes him about, even, maybe, as they swathe you about. Many men have never seen their own profiles or the backs of their heads, and for the back of your own mind no mirror has been invented. They swathe him about so thickly that the pricks of fate scarce penetrate to him, or become but a ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... crush with strength alone, The eyes that glared vindictive.—Fallen there, Vast wings upheaved me; from the Alpine peaks Whose avalanches swirl the valley mists And whelm the helpless cottage, to the crown Of Chimborazo, on whose changeless jewels The torrid rays recoil, with ne'er a cloud To swathe their blistered steps, I rested not, But preyed on all that ventured from the earth, An outlaw of the heavens.—But evermore Must death release me to the jungle shades; And there like Samson's grew my locks again In the old walks and ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... I was coming at. The evil in its broadest expanse is there. We look calmly on the external objects of the system without solving its internal grievances,—we build a right upon the ruins of ancient wrongs, and we swathe our thoughts with inconsistency that we may make the curse of a system invulnerable. It is not that we cannot do good under a bad system, but that we cannot ameliorate it, lest we weaken the foundation. And yet all this seems as nothing when I recall a sin of greater magnitude-a sin that ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... but the distant snows basked in the sky; and the sky, like a caressing mother, bending over them its immeasurable bosom, fed them with the milk of the clouds, carefully enfolding them with its swathe of mist, and refreshing them with its gently-breathing wind. Oh, with what a flight would my soul soar there, where a holy cold has stretched itself like a boundary between the earthly and the heavenly! My heart prays and thirsts to breathe the air of the inhabitants ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various
... conventions crust you round and swathe you mist-like, And the world's wheels grind your spirits down the dust ye overtrod: We stand sinlessly stark-naked in effulgence of the Christlight, And our polecat chokes not cherubs; and our skunk smells ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... few years are passed. It is winter, with a roaring wind and a thick gray fog. The graves in the church-yard are covered with snow, and there are great icicles in the church-porch. The wind now carries a swathe of snow along the tops of the graves, as though the "sheeted dead" were at some melancholy play; and hark! the icicles fall with a crash and jingle, like a solemn mockery of the echo of the unseemly mirth of one who is now coming to his ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... three blades aloft at once, and the silver-hafted sword bit deep, the gift of Phaeacian Euryalus long ago. The Guards also smote and thrust; it was for their lives they fought, and back rolled the tide of foes, leaving a swathe of dead. So a second time they came on, and a second ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang
... thou be great, after being of none account, and hast gotten riches after squalor, being foremost in these in the city, and hast knowledge concerning useful matters, so that promotion is come unto thee; then swathe not thine heart in thine hoard, for thou art become the steward of the endowments of the God. Thou art not the last; another shall be thine equal, and to him shall come ...
— The Instruction of Ptah-Hotep and the Instruction of Ke'Gemni - The Oldest Books in the World • Battiscombe G. Gunn
... Ivan was coming back from the monastery? In Yaroslavl there was such a downpour that I had to swathe myself in my leather chiton. My first impression of the Volga was poisoned by the rain, by the tear-stained windows of the cabin, and the wet nose of G., who came to meet me at the station. In the rain Yaroslavl looks like Zvenigorod, and its churches remind me of Perervinsky ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... freslige—seven-syllable lines in a quatrain, rhyming abab: a being trisyllabic, b dissyllabic rhymes. The stanza is obscure and probably corrupt; so far as it can be rendered at all, the literal translation is: "He healed the steed of Oengus / when he was in a swathe, in a cradle // there was given ... / from ...
— The Latin & Irish Lives of Ciaran - Translations Of Christian Literature. Series V. Lives Of - The Celtic Saints • Anonymous
... to live. Sometimes his wives caress his body, ply him with delicacies or swathe him in perfumed garments. Sometimes to ease their passion they make little figures of him or let themselves be dressed by him. One night they go with him to a tank and there make love in the water. Everything in the scene reminds them ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... calls, Trumpet-tongued from the walls Girding great Rome; Battle for truth and faith, Battle lest hostile scathe Crush us, or fetters swathe Free hearth and home! ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... he always did, bearing only, to vouch for his wanderings, a tanned face, and the bright, red-brown eyes that had surely looked on things we never saw. Adam Veasey, his brother, had been paralyzed for years. He sat all day in the chimney corner, looking at his shaking hands, and telling how wide a swathe he could cut before he was afflicted. Mattie, Adam's wife, had long dealt with the problem of an unsupported existence. She had turned into a flitting little creature with eager eyes, who made it her business to prey upon ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... rustic mill set on a ledge of rock. Suddenly above this landscape soars the valley, clothing its steep sides on either hand with pines; and there are emerald isles of pasture on the wooded flanks; and then cliffs, where the red-stemmed larches glow; and at the summit, shooting into ether with a swathe of mist around their basement, soar the double peaks, the one a pyramid, the other a bold broken crystal not unlike the Finsteraarhorn seen from Furka. These are connected by a snowy saddle, and snow is lying on their inaccessible crags in powdery drifts. Sunlight pours between ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... a waltz; after the waltz a polka; and then a terrible thing happened; the music, which had been sounding regularly with five-minute pauses, stopped suddenly. The lady with the great dark eyes began to swathe her violin in silk, and the gentleman placed his horn carefully in its case. They were surrounded by couples imploring them in English, in French, in Spanish, of one more dance, one only; it was still early. But the old man at the piano merely exhibited his watch and shook his head. ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... the creatures need almost constant attention. At brief intervals some expert visits each tray to inspect progress, picks up the plumpest feeders, and decides, by gently rolling them between forefinger and thumb, which are ready to spin. These are dropped into covered boxes, where they soon swathe themselves out of sight in white floss. A few only of the best are suffered to emerge from their silky sleep,—the selected breeders. They have beautiful wings, but cannot use them. They have mouths, but do not eat. They only pair, lay eggs, and die. For thousands of years their race ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... no more fires to make up; nor strays to follow; nor kids to carry to new pastures—Silvestro would do it. The luxurious rascal lay out the daylight stretched on his back with his hat over his eyes; he woke only for his meals. He would not be at the pains even to swathe his own legs or strap his own sandals. Silvestro, bathed in sweat, his fair skin burnt and blistered, his delicate hands and smooth legs scratched by brambles, his slender neck bowed beneath the weights he carried on shoulders stretched to cracking point—Silvestro worked ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... can never be mistaken, stamps every lineament of that well-known countenance. It is death's colour on the cheek; death's cold stiffness in the limbs; and no hand but his could so close those eyes and make rigid those lips. There is no swoon here! Swathe him then in the garments of the grave; make ready for the funeral; let him be buried for ever out of sight; follow him to the ancestral tomb, and let the other household dead be remembered, and the other sad processions from the home of the living to the home of the lost and ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod
... said. "I told you I'd cut quite a swathe, when I first talked to you about myself. Let it go for the present and come down to this ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... Contrivance, and agreed to do whatever they should require of me: They immediately began to swaddle me up in my Night-Gown with long Pieces of Linnen, which they folded about me till they had wrapt me in above an hundred Yards of Swathe: My Arms were pressed to my Sides, and my Legs closed together by so many Wrappers one over another, that I looked like an AEgyptian Mummy. As I stood bolt upright upon one End in this antique Figure, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... as though the sable dye[FN120] upon her palms, * Were raven perching on a swathe of freshest snow; Thou seest Sun and Moon conjoined in her face, * While Sun fear-dimmed and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... proprietors. The hundred yoke of oxen, meanwhile, standing patient, gazing wishfully meadowward, at that inaccessible waving native grass, uncut but by the great mower Time, who cuts so broad a swathe, without so much as a wisp to wind about ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... big Mat slew the grass from the rising to the going down of the sun—moon-daisies, sorrel, and buttercups lay in rows of swathe as he mowed. I wonder whether the man ever thought, as he reposed at noontide on a couch of grass under the hedge? Did he think that those immense muscles, that broad, rough-hewn plank of a chest of his, those vast bones encased in sinewy ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... said softly, "where are you, Stair?" A full swathe of broom moved itself aside, and she could see Stair Garland lying in a rocky niche which he had prepared long before, in case of such a very probable emergency as the officers of the excise coming ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... looked about. On one hand there was a mown swathe of thistles, on the other they still grew luxuriantly all down the slope to ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... its work, and the limb comes out of the water alarmingly swollen, good and skilful bandaging will do excellent work. If you have at hand an old shirt, or some such thing, tear it into strips about three inches wide, till you have as much material as will swathe the whole limb from behind the toes up to the top of the thigh. This need not be all in one piece, but only so that you may apply it in such a way as to bring a very gentle pressure on the whole surface of the injured limb. It is important that the bandaging should be comfortable. ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... beheld my woe! Ever thine eye, most mournful friend, O'er books and papers saw me bend; But would that I, on mountains grand, Amid thy blessed light could stand, With spirits through mountain-caverns hover, Float in thy twilight the meadows over, And, freed from the fumes of lore that swathe me, To health in ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... unstable wanderers to whom a few bushes stuck in the sand as a screen from prevailing winds represent the home of the hour and all that the word signifies and embodies. Many a one was laid to rest beneath its spreading branches, for it was the custom of the pre-white folk's days to swathe the dead in frail strips of bark, knees to chin, and place the stiffened corpse in a shallow pit in the humpy which had been in most recent occupation. If the dead during life had possessed exceptional qualities, burial rites would be ceremonious and prolonged. With tear and ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... upon the Brigade. This and a severe outbreak of Spanish 'flue provided him with a regular hundred patients a day. He himself had bitter personal experience of the boils. We never saw him without one for ten weeks. His own method of dealing with their excruciating tenderness was to swathe his face in cotton-wool and sticking-plaster. "Damn me, doctor, if you don't look like a loose imitation of Von Tirpitz," burst out the adjutant one day, when the doctor, with a large boil on either side of his ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... it made the swathe better there than anywhere else," they reply. "Witless now is Njal," says Hallgerda, "though he knows how to give counsel ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders
... the Squire, is a stout, middle-aged man, with a heavy-bearded face, to whom Frank introduces you as "Captain Dick"; and he tells you moreover that he is a better butcher, a better wall-layer, and cuts a broader "swathe," than any man upon the farm. Beside all which he has an immense deal of information. He knows in the spring where all the crows'-nests are to be found; he tells Frank where the foxes burrow; he has even shot two or three raccoons in the swamps; he knows ...
— Dream Life - A Fable Of The Seasons • Donald G. Mitchell
... of men. Think of all the sighs that go up at every moment from burdened hearts, of the tears that run down so many blanched and anxious cheeks. Think of 'all the misery that is done under the sun!' If it could be made visible, what a dark pall would swathe the world, an atmosphere of sorrow rolling ever with it through space. The sight is too sad to be seen by any but by Him who cures it all, and it wrung from His heart the sigh with which ere He cured one poor sufferer—a drop in the ocean—He looked up to heaven, as in mute ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... Pause in the swathe, shading their eyes, to watch Or barge or schooner stealing up from sea: Themselves in twilight, she a twilit ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... there entered to them a tall aged woman, with one swathe of a turban across her long level brows; and she had hard black eyes, and close lips and a square chin; and it was the mother of Ruark. She strode forward toward Bhanavar to greet her, and folded her legs before the damsel. Presently she said, 'Tell ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... rose-color, and purple, and amber, and blue, not shining, but misty-soft, the barred masses, when seen nearer, found to be woven in tresses of cloud, like floss silk, looking as if each knot were a little swathe or sheaf ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... What cares Zeus for him? Fate despises love. Why, lads more exquisite, brimming with promise, A thousand times have been lost for the lack Of just the help a watchful god might give; But which the best of fathers, best of mothers, Of friends, of lovers cannot quite supply. Powers, who swathe man's virtue up in weakness, Then plunge his delicate mind in hot desire, Preparing pleasure first and after shame To bandage round his eyes,—these gods are not The friends of men.' The Delphis of old days before me stood, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... ever, he released his clutch and slid downward his gear-lever. With a chuckle and shudder the long, black machine sprang forward, and shot with a soft sigh from her powerful engines down the sloping gradient. The driver stooped and switched off his electric head-lights. Only a dim grey swathe cut through the black heath indicated the line of his road. From in front there came presently a confused puffing and rattling and clanging as the oncoming car breasted the slope. It coughed and spluttered on a powerful, old-fashioned low gear, while its engine throbbed like a weary heart. The ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... leave them there, while they themselves returned home. The Lord, who had sworn unto their ancestors to multiply them, sent one of His angels to wash the babes, anoint them, stretch their limbs, and swathe them. Then he would give them two smooth pebbles, from one of which they sucked milk, and from the other honey. And God caused the hair of the infants to grow down to their knees and serve them as a protecting garment, and then He ordered the earth to receive the babes, that they be sheltered ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... heliographs, one to the north-east and one to the south-west, told that two British columns, those of De Lisle and of Barter, were hastening to the rescue. But the Boers had passed as the storm does, and nothing but their swathe of destruction was left to show where they had been. They had taken away the guns during the night, and were already beyond the reach ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Persian front advanc'd, And Sohrab arm'd in Haman's tent, and came. And as afield the reapers cut a swathe 290 Down through the middle of a rich man's corn, And on each side are squares of standing corn, And in the midst a stubble, short and bare; So on each side were squares of men, with spears Bristling, and in the midst, the open ...
— Narrative and Lyric Poems (first series) for use in the Lower School • O. J. Stevenson
... drudge, is on thy mind? No more in even swathe thou layest the corn: Thy fellow-reapers leave thee far behind, As flocks a ewe that's footsore from a thorn. By noon and midday what will be thy plight If now, so soon, ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus
... of gold The scroll of a life unrolled; Swathe him deep in his purple stole; Ashes of diamonds, crystalled coal, Drops of ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... straight and true. The distance was short, and it came from generators that were perhaps not equaled in space; no ordinary ship's defensive web could resist its vicious thrust. From the streak of silver that represented the Hawk's swoop, a stream of orange cut a swathe through the air ahead, holding accurately on the brigand ship. For just a tick of time there was a turmoil of color as offensive ray met defensive web; then the air cleared again—and the ...
— Hawk Carse • Anthony Gilmore
... observes how these over-clothe the upper parts of their children, and leave their tender little lower limbs exposed to the rigours of northern latitudes, while, as if to make up for this inconsistency by an inconsistent counterpoise, they swathe their own tough and mature limbs in thick flannel from head ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... attendants, of whom many had been engaged, had taken possession of the offices, &c., and were bringing the Hut once more into a habitable condition. Soon, too, a report was brought that the mowers, who had been brought in anticipation of their services being wanted, had cut a broad swathe to the ruins of the chapel, and the graves of ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... we decided to try a plan that was really no plan at all; that is to say, to seek more or less at random, till we consumed all our stores except just enough to take us home. Meanwhile, we would, each of us, every day, cut a sort of radiating swathe, working single-handed, from the cove entrance. Thus we would prospect as much of the country as possible in a sort of fan, both of us keeping our eyes open for a compass carved on a rock. In this way ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... famished wanderers; While with remorseless guilt they undermine Palace and shed, their very father's house, O blind! their own, their children's heritage, To leave more ample space for fearful wealth. Plunder in some most harmless guise they swathe, Call it some very meek and hallowed name, Some known and borne by their good forefathers, And own and vaunt it thus redeemed from sin. These are the plagues heaven sends o'er every land Before it sink, the portents of the street, Not of the air, lest nations should complain Of distance ...
— Count Julian • Walter Savage Landor
... firmly. "You'd be content to be introduced to the Prince with a great swathe of dirty, blood-stained linen round your head, regardless of ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough |
