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Tidal wave   /tˈaɪdəl weɪv/   Listen
Tidal wave

noun
1.
An overwhelming manifestation of some emotion or phenomenon.  "The flood of letters hit him with the force of a tidal wave" , "A tidal wave of crime"
2.
An unusual (and often destructive) rise of water along the seashore caused by a storm or a combination of wind and high tide.
3.
A wave resulting from the periodic flow of the tides that is caused by the gravitational attraction of the moon and sun.






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"Tidal wave" Quotes from Famous Books



... propose to do about it? What do we propose to do with more than two millions for whom Christ died, American citizens, in the very heart of our Nation, around whom the currents of commerce and industry swirl every day? Shall the greatest tidal wave of all time pass them by, and they not feel it for a moment? More than all, shall the great gospel of God, which is life, and hope, and peace, and home, for us, be nothing ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889 • Various

... I'm getting to like music with go to it—with bang and brass. Wagner does it; honest, Jane, when I hear his trombones coming into a theme, I get ideas enough to give the whole force in the office nervous prostration for a month. To-night when that thing was swelling up like a great tidal wave of music rolling in, I worked out a big idea; I'm going to sell all the mills and factories back to the millers for our stock, and when I own every dollar of our stock, I'm going to double the price ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White

... mountain had been, naught but a heap of smoking, crumbling rocks was to be seen. Back Cup had become a group of jagged reefs against which the sea, that had been thrown back like a gigantic tidal wave, was beating and frothing. ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne

... comes a time, sooner or later, to a great poet when, after many experiments, the doors of his intellect and soul fly open, and his genius is flooded with the action and thought of what seems a universe. And with this revelation of Man and Nature, a tidal wave of creative power, new and impelling, carries the poet far beyond the station where last he rested. It came to Browning now. The creation of Palma would be enough to prove it, but there is not a character or scene in Sordello which ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke

... a reverent scrutiny of the nature of things. The more carefully "the Cosmic process" is studied, the clearer it becomes that events are so ordered that, sooner or later, everything helps toward richer and better conditions. A tidal wave or a pestilence may seem to be inexplicable, but even pestilence teaches men habits of thrift and cleanliness, and tidal waves warn them of ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford

... surged through him and over him with all the blind, brutal, compelling force of a mighty tidal wave. It battered down and swept away the frail barriers of his new-found gentleness. Again he was the Mucker—hating the artificial wall of social caste which separated him from this girl; but now he was ready to climb the wall, or, better still, to batter it down with ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... and make sentiment for the overthrow of the traffic in humanity. It took all this to bring it about. No great moral reform takes place without agitation, or without martyrs. Those men bore the brunt of battle before the battle was. They were most surely heroes. They made the tidal wave of opinion that swept the country with insistent force and struck the ...
— The Daughter of a Republican • Bernie Babcock

... until the English and French Armies could get into the field; the policy of systematic terrorism that followed this discovery; the unpreparedness of Belgium's allies, which left this heroic little army practically unsupported for so long against the German tidal wave. ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... separated from the Orkneys by the Pentland Firth, a strait about 14 miles long and from 6 to 8 miles broad. Owing to the rush of the tide, navigation is difficult, and, in rough weather, dangerous. The tidal wave races at a speed which varies from 6 to 12 m. an hour. At the meeting of the western and eastern currents the waves at times rise into the air like a waterspout, but the current does not always nor everywhere flow at a uniform ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... still reeling from the spiritual impact with this female tidal wave when he became aware, as one who, coming out of a swoon, hears voices faintly, that he was being addressed by Miss Leonard. To turn from Miss Leonard's friend to Miss Leonard herself was like hearing the falling of gentle rain after a thunderstorm. For a moment ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse

... August, the 2d and 3d of September, the 21st of January, the 31st of May, the 30th of October, and the 9th Thermidor; I can understand the egregious torch of civil wars, which inflames instead of soothing the blood; I can understand the tidal wave of revolution, sweeping on with its flux, that nothing can arrest, and its reflux, which carries with it the ruins of the institution which it has itself shattered. I can understand all that, but lance against lance, sword against sword, men against men, a people against a ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas

... to be quoted in the news-market of the world. Each night, from thousands of spots all over the surface of the globe, it received thousands of facts, of cold, accomplished facts. It knew that a tidal wave had swept through China, a cabinet had changed in Chili, in Texas an express train had been held up and robbed, "Spike" Kennedy had defeated the "Dutchman" in New Orleans, the Oregon had coaled outside of ...
— Ranson's Folly • Richard Harding Davis

... at that moment would be to let loose a scourge upon society. But what a difference after I have lain in bed looking at the ceiling for an hour or so. The milk of human kindness comes surging back into me like a tidal wave. I love my species. Give me a bit of breakfast then, and let me enjoy a quiet meditative smoke, and I am a pleasure to all with whom ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 22, 1914 • Various

... drove properly, you wouldn't be found dead; and you would know them," I had begun, when there was a ring at the gate bell, and the high wall of the garden abruptly opened to admit a tidal wave ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... you? It is so true that the end is in sight. Conspiracy is talked openly in the streets, in the cafes, everywhere. The Osians will be sand in the face of a tidal wave. A word from me, and Kronau follows it. It all would be so easy were it ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath

... eastward, than they did in former times. Here then we have one fact of water tide more comprehensive, at least, than the tractive theory of the moon. We have also the fact of two great promontories in Capes Horn and Good Hope, where this great tidal wave must strike against, and they produce constant oscillations of the water to and fro, and produce gurgitation and regurgitation in all the gulfs and rivers that line the coasts of the Northern, or more properly, the Land Hemisphere. These gurgitations swell the water ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various

... for a time, to give all men, women, and children all they want to eat, and to enable them to eat all they want as often as they want. Subsistence will be pushed back, temporarily, an exceedingly long way. In consequence, the flood of life will rise like a tidal wave. There will be more marriages and more children born. The enforced sterility that obtains to-day for many millions, will no longer obtain. Nor will the fecund millions in the slums and labour-ghettos, who to-day die of all the ills due to chronic underfeeding and overcrowding, ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London

... Gibbon: the next stage is the flight of Empire from Rome to Byzantium, even as the Anglo-Celtic power might find its centre some day not in London but in Chicago or Toronto. There is the whole strange story of the tidal wave of Mahommedanism from the south, submerging all North Africa, spreading right and left to India on the one side and to Spain on the other, finally washing right over the walls of Byzantium until ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle

... midst of that heaving human sea rose the bulwarks of a wooden stand. But how to reach it? Jim was evidently a personage. The rough farmers commonly squeezed a way for him. And when they did not, he made it with his big body. As they drew near their haven, a great surging as of a tidal wave swept them off their feet. There was a deafening shout, and the stand rocked on its foundations. Before Stephen could collect his wits, a fierce battle was raging about him. Abolitionist and Democrat, Free Soiler and Squatter Sov, defaced one another ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... that at a certain time a tidal wave would engulf our homes, how we should work to save all that we could before the calamity overtook us! And we should set about the saving of our forests with equal care, for their destruction means distress for every one ...
— Checking the Waste - A Study in Conservation • Mary Huston Gregory

... been driven back from Romola's lips a fortnight before rose again with the gathered force of a tidal wave. She spoke with a decision which told him that she ...
— Romola • George Eliot

... worrying over Grand Duke Nicholas's open secret?" I asked, citing the report via Petrograd and London of a new projected Russian offensive that was to take the form, not of a steam roller, but of a "tidal wave ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... solve the negro problem by inspiring the entire race with an irresistible desire to cut its throat. If a tidal wave would wash Ireland out of existence and the blacks in this country would dispose of themselves, how happy we all should be! What ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton

... that swept over him like some mighty tidal wave, wrenching from its foundations every impeding barrier, could move him to surrender; and who was she to arouse such passion in any lover? She was only a woman human and faulty. She had indeed a heart to bestow, and without vain boasting it was a heart worth the winning; she held ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett

... scythed destruction along the enemy line, the gaps filled and lethal orange leaped out again. Now the black cloud was piling up, was rising till it was a towering curtain against the sky. On it came, like some monstrous tidal wave. Great rents were torn through it by the stabbing beams of the flying forts, holes where ships and men had been whiffed into dust by the hundred. But ...
— When the Sleepers Woke • Arthur Leo Zagat

... simple. The Teutons were to be compelled to disinterest themselves in the affairs of Russia, with whose destinies their own are so closely bound up. But they soon realized that such a partition is useless as a breakwater against the tidal wave of Teutondom, and Germany is still destined to play the part ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon

... from a level with her head, where the Queen saw, stranded in a huge tree, a boat with a funnel that poured forth smoke, and with wheels that still rapidly and automatically revolved in mid air. In fact, a missionary steamer had been raised by the mighty tidal wave to the level of the cliff. Then the sailors climbed into the trees, talking freely, in a speech which Queen Mab knew for English, but not at all the English she had been accustomed to hear. Also the sailors had among them men with full, sleek, shining faces, wearing ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang

... that of the famine at Orissa, destroyed over thirty thousand of their houses; and, three years later, in 1870, another cyclone was equally destructive among these dwellings. The Hoogly River is visited, during the monsoons, about the last of April, by a tidal wave, which dashes up from the sea at a speed of twenty miles an hour, causing much destruction. Ships lying off the city often part their cables, and are driven on shore; while many small craft, along the eighty miles of river course, are not unfrequently ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou

... you. Oh, do you think all our hearts did not throb and all our nerves thrill when we heard how, when you were ordered to occupy that terrible quarry in Hulluch, and you swept into it at the head of your men like a sea-god riding on a tidal wave, you suddenly sprang over the top shouting "To Berlin! Forward!"; dashed at the German army single-handed; and were cut off and made ...
— Augustus Does His Bit • George Bernard Shaw

... with aching legs and parched lips, but as an unnatural phenomenon, or a gigantic monster which wipes out a railway station, a cornfield, and a village with a single clutch of one of its tentacles. You would as soon attribute human qualities to a plague, a tidal wave, or a slowly slipping landslide. One of the tentacles composed of six thousand horse had detached itself and crossed the river below the bridge, where it was creeping up on Botha's right. We could see the burghers galloping before it toward Ventersburg. At the bridge ...
— Notes of a War Correspondent • Richard Harding Davis

... Rachael had come to her, and without her husband. For a moment she had a confused idea that the earth was rocking, and congratulated herself that the house was too high for a tidal wave to reach. Then Dr. Hamilton entered with Rachael in his arms and laid her on the bed. He left at once, saying that he would return in the morning. Mary Fawcett had not risen, and her chair faced the bed. Rachael lay staring at her mother until Mary found her voice ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton

... the night—a cloud of billowing steam—a wall of water rearing back from the strange grave of the asteroid, so far come from its accustomed orbit around Mars.... The thought came to Carse that Dr. Ku Sui had died as he lived, spectacularly, with a brilliance and a tidal wave and an earthquake to disturb the lives ...
— The Passing of Ku Sui • Anthony Gilmore

... The tidal wave of fanaticism, which had swept the frontier, had influenced the Mohmands, as all other border peoples. Their situation was, however, in several important respects, different from that of the natives of the Swat ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill

... A tidal wave of red and brass broke through the gaps in the rail fence, and the sunlight rippled along a wavering line of British bayonets. They crept nearer, nearer, until Jabez could see the grim ferocity, the bared teeth, the staring ...
— The Junior Classics • Various

... the small islands, and seen in the sea-eel, or Maraena. If the sea-eel happened to be driven on to the shore in a gale or by any tidal wave it portended evil, and created a commotion ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner

... Meldon, "if an earthquake came—the kind of earthquake which knocks down houses—and if thunderbolts were falling red-hot out of the sky, and if a large tidal wave was rushing up across the lawn, and if a moving bog was desolating your kitchen garden and engulfing your polo ponies, would you or would you not sit calmly there and go on ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham

... came in the weaving gray lines we fancied this surely was all. All? What we saw there was a puny dribbling stream compared with the torrent that was coming. The crest of that living tidal wave was still two days and many miles to the rearward. We had seen the head and a little of the neck. The swollen body of the myriad-legged gray centipede ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb

... outcry of a wholly undisciplined, hungry, and panic-smitten public; and, upon the other side, the irresponsible, more than half-hysterical action of a group of terrified and incompetent politicians. These men had been swept into great positions, which they were totally unfitted to fill, by a tidal wave of reactionary public feeling, and of the blind selfishness of a decadence born of long freedom from any form of national discipline; of liberties too easily won and but half-understood; of superficial education as to rights, and abysmal ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson

... to the farthest limits of the town the cheers of victory swept in a tidal wave of sound. With one accord the people, leaping, shouting, dancing, and cheering, raced ...
— The White Mice • Richard Harding Davis

... missing for more than twenty-four hours before a tidal wave of crime swept the city. In a single night there were a score of robberies, holdups, burglaries and bandit raids. The gamblers and handbook agents resumed their business, women were attacked on the streets, bootleg liquor flowed like a river and pickpockets victimized a dozen ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson

... come nightly to the sky; The tidal wave comes to the sea; Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high, Can keep my own ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs

... victor, and abandoned himself to fresh pleasures, a new and irresistible force unexpectedly arose which changed the fate of the day. Wickersham tried to stem the current, but in vain. It was a tidal wave. Ferdy Wickersham faced defeat, and he could not stand it. He suddenly abandoned college, and went off, it was said, with a coryphee. His father and mother did not know of it for some time ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page

... kind of dread, rather than hatred, of persons with a large excess of vitality; great feeders, great laughers, great story-tellers, who come sweeping over their company with a huge tidal wave of animal spirits and boisterous merriment. I have pretty good spirits myself, and enjoy a little mild pleasantry, but I am oppressed and extinguished by these great lusty, noisy creatures, and feel as if I were a mute at a funeral when they get ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III. (of X.) • Various

... the Jewel of the Flood Tide, and whoever holds it in his possession can command the sea to roll in and to flood the land at any time that he wills. The kanjiu is also called the Jewel of the Ebbing Tide, and this gem controls the sea and the waves thereof, and will cause even a tidal wave ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki

... its large quasi-tidal wave presents a mass of water to the Blue Nile, which acts as a buffer to its rapid flood. The White Nile being at a considerable height when the Blue rushes down its steep slopes, presents its brother Nile with a soft cushion into which it plunges, and is restrained by the vis inertiae ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone

... a tidal wave one hundred and twenty feet high which, with the lava clots and ash ejected, destroyed all of the towns and plantations bordering on both sides of the straits. In this disaster more than forty thousand ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson

... Berlin," was the shout of the French army in July, 1870; but, to the astonishment of the world, the French forces were cut in two and rolled as by a tidal wave into Metz and around Sedan. Soon two French armies and the Emperor surrendered, and German troopers paraded the ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden

... City of Refuge is nearly intact, as is that of the large heiau. Another heiau was destroyed by a tidal wave. The place is now a public park. Stokes, of the Bishop Museum, has done much work here and at Napoopoo. The result of his labors will ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke

... years of the Lutheran Reformation were from 1517 to 1525, when the whole nation was in commotion, and a great revolutionary tidal wave seemed to be sweeping every class and every higher interest one step nearer to its ideal of life.... The Lutheran Reformation had been most truly religious and creative when it embraced the whole of human life and enlisted the enthusiasm of all ideal men and movements. When it became ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair

... a flutter of cards on the felts marked the first rounds of the hands. In a few minutes they were as absorbed as if nothing had happened to ruffle the depths; but in the pool of every woman's nature the deepest spot shelters the lost causes of life, and from it wells a tidal wave ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess

... The crisis had come in spite of a year's defiant struggle. It had broken down the barrier of trivial commonplaces behind which they had always sought shelter; it had rushed over them in a flash, like a sudden tidal wave, scorning their painfully erected defenses, driving them helplessly before it. It had no apparent cause, save that in that moment of alarm she had looked at him with her soul unguarded, and he, overwhelmed ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie

... the sky; The tidal wave unto the sea; Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high, Can keep my ...
— Graded Poetry: Seventh Year - Edited by Katherine D. Blake and Georgia Alexander • Various

... The great tidal wave set in motion by the piano has swept over the civilized world, carrying with it hosts of accomplished pianists. Of some of those who are familiar figures in our musical centres it has been said that Teresa Carreno learned from Rubinstein the art of piano necromancy; ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore

... by a succession of important changes, but that ride of fortune, be it good or ill, culminates, recedes, goes quite out, and leaves life on a level beach of commonplaces. Then, sooner or later, the current of affairs turns again; sometimes with a calm, irresistible flow, sometimes in a tidal wave of sudden and overwhelming strength. After Hyde's and Katherine's marriage, there was a long era noticeable only for such vicissitudes as were incident to their fortune and position. But in May, A.D. 1774, the first murmur of the returning tide of destiny ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr

... gods are nothing if not capricious; and the 'advanced guard,' reaching the summit, found no promised land spread out below them, but a mass of blue-black cloud, heavy with snow, surging up the valley, with the rush of a tidal wave and the breath of an iceberg, blotting out creation as it came; till it shrouded the little band of men—'unconquering, yet unconquered'—in a sinister twilight, cold ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver

... how Christ has been overlaid. I went along now, recalling long-neglected phrases and sentences; I had a new vision of that great central figure preaching love with hate and coarse thinking even in the disciples about Him, rising to a tidal wave at last in that clamour for Barabbas, and the public satisfaction in ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells

... indeed, in the great movement, but not, strictly speaking, a working part of it. A time was coming, as we now know, when a flood of people was suddenly to overflow our city, sweeping onward to and over the mainland like a tidal wave from the great ocean of life; but whether it was by some fortunate chance decree of an overruling Providence, it did not come till the city was better than of old and ...
— Some Reminiscences of old Victoria • Edgar Fawcett

... the excitement of the moment observe. One thing is certain, while the quarrel between the Hudson's Bay governor and the North-West clerk was becoming more furious, our surging cohorts were closing in on the little band like an irresistible tidal wave. I could make out several Hudson's Bay faces, that seemed to remind me of my Fort Douglas visit; but of the rabble of Nor'-Westers and Bois-Brules disguised in hideous war-gear, I dare avow not twenty of ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut

... weights to sink her; and when I gave the word to cut loose she made a splash like a small tidal wave and ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris

... married. It was, of course, a failure. Her vacillating nature was such that she could not be absolutely true to the man to whom she had given her life, and, after several bitter experiences, she had the horror of seeing him kill himself in front of her. There was a momentary spasm of grief, a tidal wave of remorse, and then the peculiar recuperation of spirits, beauty and attractiveness that so marks this type of woman. She was deceived by other men in many various ways, and finally came to that stage of life that is known in theatrical ...
— The Easiest Way - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Eugene Walter

... lined with mighty buildings, after the passage of a tidal wave greater than ever before known to man. The devastation would be indescribable. Multiply that shoreline by the vast area which had housed the Gens of Dalis, and the mental picture is almost too big to grasp. Chaos, catastrophe, approaching ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various

... ran at the rate of five and a half miles an hour, and the next day they saw, as it was running out, the "bore," or tidal wave, booming in to meet and ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh

... a dog! it was due to a greve, a strike. It came upon the Papeete people like a tidal wave out of the sea, or like a cyclone that devastates a Paumotu atoll, but, entre nous, it had been brooding for months. Fish had been getting dearer and dearer for a long time, and householders had complained bitterly. They recalled the time when for a franc one could buy enough delicious ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien

... everything before it! It would uproot and destroy buildings, sweep the rocky covering of the earth free of soil; and humanity, caught on the earth below the highest level of the world's greatest tidal wave, would be engulfed!" ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various

... work? No one has money. Even those rich villa people, Americans, are unable to pay their servants. There is no "work" save in the fields garnering crops, for which no wages are paid. Their country is a devastated waste, tenanted by the enemy, who spread like a tidal wave of destruction in all directions. We take the better class into our homes, clothe them and feed them gladly, that we may in a minute way repay the debt civilization owes their husbands, sons, and fathers. France, too, is invaded, and now thousands more ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various

... a Deity. No benign Deity could allow His own created humanity to be crushed in bleeding masses, like the grapes trampled in the vats of a vineyard. Whole cities swallowed up by earthquake; islands swept of their people by a tidal wave; a vast ship pierced by an iceberg and going down with its thousand souls; provinces spread with the vile elements of a plague which carpeted the land with dead; mines flooded by water or devastated by fire; the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... she was with every line of him, the sudden revelation of the sunlight acted like a charm. She had been hiding her eyes for many days from all light, veiling them in the darkness of her grief, and the splendour of the man fairly dazzled her. It rushed upon her, swift, overmastering as a tidal wave, and before it even the memory of her sorrow ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell

... streets known such a stillness as prevailed this night. The pure soprano which had thrilled a world of high-priced audiences rang out in a wondrous clarion harmony. It moved many people to tears. The response was overwhelming. Something in that vast human pack went out to the singer like a tidal wave. Not the deafening fusilade of hand-clapping nor the shouted "Bravos!" It was something deeper, subtler. Tetrazzini stepped forward. Tears streamed from her eyes. She blew ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman

... the proprietor of the new penny paper that is struggling to keep its head above water. Don't say that it came from me. Say that it came from a converted roper-in." And Mr. BEZZLE stalked out of the office in such a tempest of morality that the publisher felt as though a tidal wave of virtue ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II. No. 38, Saturday, December 17, 1870. • Various

... against himself. He had scarcely been conscious of time or place since parting the previous day with the friend he was so bent on securing, and when at last he slept in the small hours of the morning he dreamt that he had been caught by a mighty tidal wave that was bearing him swiftly towards heaven on its silver crest. When he awoke, the wave, so far from being a bubble, seemed a grand spiritual reality, and he felt as if he had already reached a seventh heaven of vague, undefined ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe

... nothing broke, that somehow I kept my hold, and that in the end the wire ran red-hot through my palms so that both were torn and bleeding when I stood panting beside Raffles in the flower-beds. There was no time for thinking then. Already there was a fresh commotion in-doors; the tidal wave of excitement which had swept all before it to the upper regions was subsiding in as swift a rush downstairs; and I raced after Raffles along the edge of the drive ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung

... similar manner the tidal wave produced by the moon is the means whereby a part of the energy stored in the earth is compelled to expend itself in work. Let me illustrate this by a comparison between the earth rotating on its axis and the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various

... And there were none on the space fronting Esplanade Row, West. Dalhousie Square and Old Court House Street were also very bare of trees—scarcely one to be seen. The loss of life amongst the natives was appalling, caused principally by the huge storm or tidal wave accompanying the cyclone, resembling a solid wall of water, which at Diamond Harbour rose to the height of 34 feet; when it reached Calcutta it was 27 to 28 feet, rushing up the Hooghly from the sea at the rate of 20 miles an hour, destroying and overwhelming everything it encountered in its ...
— Recollections of Calcutta for over Half a Century • Montague Massey

... Her feet crush creeping things: there is a busy ant or blazoned beetle, with its back broken, writhing in the dust, unseen. A germ flies from a stagnant pool, and the laughing child, its mother's darling, dies dreadfully of diphtheria. A tidal wave rolls landward, and twenty thousand human beings are drowned, or crushed to death. A volcano bursts suddenly into eruption, and a beautiful city is a heap of ruins, and its inhabitants are charred or mangled corpses. And the Heavenly Father, who is Love, has power ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford

... tumult began at exactly 10.47, with the arrival of Mr. McGuire Ellis, traveling up the staircase five steps at a jump and calling in a strangled voice for Wayne. That usually controlled journalist rushed out of an inner room in alarm, demanding to know whether New York City had been whelmed with a tidal wave or the King of England murdered in his bed, and in an instant was struggling in the grasp ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... tidal wave of the German armies that threatened to engulf Paris had just been checked. With the thunder of their advance Paris was still shaken. The withdrawal of men to the front, and of women and children to Bordeaux and the coast, had left the city uninhabited. The streets ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis

... resistance, knowing its cause hopeless, but determined to sell life as dearly as possible. But the 'cello, too, went down and for a bar or two the flutes and oboes sang a paean of victory. Too soon. Upon them, like a tidal wave, swept down a hurricane of brasses and shook the hall ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky

... overland march for the capital of Mexico. Santa Anna, with a great force, awaited him in a strong position at Cerro Gordo, but Scott seized the key of it in a lofty height commanding the Mexican position, and soon won a decisive victory. The American army swept on like a tidal wave, and city after city fell before it, until, on the twentieth of August, it reached the city of the Montezumas. An armistice delayed the advance until September 7, but on that day offensive operations were begun. Great fortifications ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson

... opposed, up to this date, to Philip's preaching and ideas of Christian living. He had built up a strong buttress of admiring and believing members in the church. This stood, with Mr. Winter's influence, as a breakwater against the tidal wave of opposition now beginning to pour in upon him. There was an element in Calvary Church conservative to a degree, and yet strong in its growing belief that Christian action and Church work in the world had reached a certain crisis, which would result either in the ...
— The Crucifixion of Philip Strong • Charles M. Sheldon

... against the shuttered windows of a shop and stared at him. The sea, rushing out in some monstrous tidal wave had left its floor littered with old wreckage, with dead, forgotten people who stirred and lifted themselves. A grotesque, ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie

... been an oath, the nervous giggle of old Edward King, and then silence. Now the voice of Joe Welling, sharp and clear, broke forth. George Willard began to laugh. He understood. As he had swept all men before him, so now Joe Welling was carrying the two men in the room off their feet with a tidal wave of words. The listener in the hall walked up and ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson

... not moved from their original position. They would all stay where they were, of course—Alden with his mother, and Edith with her husband. Then, with a shock, Edith remembered Rosemary—she was the one who had been swept aside as though by a tidal wave. ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed

... I made a formal and peremptory refusal to be a candidate again, which was encountered by a like appeal. It was the year of what was called the Tidal Wave which swept the Republicans from power in the House of Representatives. It was very doubtful whether they could carry the Worcester District. The Democrats elected a majority of the Massachusetts ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar

... A Democratic tidal wave had swept over the country at the preceding fall elections, and the Democrats had a considerable majority in the House of Representatives. John G. Carlisle, of Kentucky, who was elected Speaker, was a tall, well-made man, with a studious look in his eyes, and the ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore

... upon one condition only," said he. "Destroy the indictment against me and my ship. Write a document to the effect that you have found no traces of slaves upon my staunch craft. Say that my boat was driven from her anchor by a tidal wave—and you can put your feet upon ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston

... or fancy that God sends a tidal wave through man, bringing with it from Heaven's ocean fragments set afloat from its shore to lodge in our lives, until there comes an ebb, and then begin our hopes and desires all to tend heavenward, or elsewhere? Have you never felt, do you ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various

... somersaulting; high up on the shore were stranded floes and fragments, left in the wake of the moving body. Onward it coursed, clashing and grinding along the brittle face of the glacier; over the alder tops beyond the bend they could see it moving faster and faster, like the crest of a tidal wave. The surface of the river lowered swiftly beneath the bridge; the huge white pans ground and milled, shouldered aside by the iron-sheathed pillars ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach

... You suspect him of being innocent!" His face is convulsed and he explodes with an enormous laugh, a laugh irresistible as a tidal wave, the ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse

... thumb on his plastic mind without his conscious knowledge. Canada with her young, red-blooded vigour swept into him like a tidal wave of open sea into a sluggish, marshy creek. Canada thrust her vastness and her limitless potentialities at him with a careless hand, as though to say: "Here's opportunity for the taking." Canada taught him in ten days what at home he ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg

... watching it, the lecture or sermon which is so interesting that we are absorbed in listening to it, that claims our best thought and comprehension. It is when our mind's powers are thus driven by a tidal wave of interest that we are at our best, and that we receive and register the lasting impressions which become a part of our mental equipment ...
— How to Teach Religion - Principles and Methods • George Herbert Betts

... of human life and property is the fact, now satisfactorily established, that the discharge of ashes was so great as to cause a series of extraordinarily brilliant sunsets all over the world, while the force of the tidal wave was such as to affect the level of the water in the river Thames. In travelling from Batavia to Singapore, I was fortunate enough to meet with an officer in the employ of the Netherlands India Steamship Company, who was able to give me ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold

... It is really a libel on all progress, grace and moral justice. The God and dear Saviors whom I love and honor are not monsters of cruel vengeance. There exist so many excellent signs of the good time to dawn on the human race, when the tidal wave once really sets into combined, perpetual motion. Let us all desire to thus aid the race along these lines, or ...
— Cupology - How to Be Entertaining • Clara

... think Bernique is getting restless, too. He will be drifting off soon on that tidal wave of ore fever that comes over him; Piney has been gone for a great while. It's pretty lonely. It's getting on my nerves. Of course I shouldn't pet my nerves if I had any hope about the run here, but I haven't. I think that the work we have carried on ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young

... still see the ruins of the town at the bottom of the sea—I have sailed over it in what is now the harbour, and there beneath, on the deep sands, lost to time and trouble, is the slain and tortured town of Savanna la Mar. Was the Master of the World angry that day when, with a besom of wind and a tidal wave, He swept the place into the sea? Or was it some devil's work while the Lord of All slept? As the Spanish ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... Allen be elected, the immediate effect is very sure to be a prodigious rise in the threatening and dangerous tidal wave of inflation and repudiation. The political tradition which goes by the name of the Democratic party, will be forthwith pervaded in every part by an active and aggressive ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard



Words linked to "Tidal wave" :   moving ridge, wave, calamity, manifestation, cataclysm, catastrophe, disaster, tragedy



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