Gale

“ As the gale reached its height, it was a sight at once terrible and beautiful, to watch, standing in the lantern, the goaded sea, whose foam-capped waves could plainly be seen at the horizon line, breaking here and there upon sunken rocks, over which in their playful moods they scarcely rippled, but on which they now dashed with such white fury as to make them discernible, even through the darkness of night. ”

“ The sleet-and-hail squalls following the lightning at the end of a westerly gale are cold and benumbing and stinging and cruel enough. But the dry, Easterly weather, when it turns to wet, seems to rain poisoned showers upon your head. ”

“ For, after all, a gale of wind, the thing of mighty sound, is inarticulate. It is man who, in a chance phrase, interprets the elemental passion of his enemy. Thus there is another gale in my memory, a thing of endless, deep, humming roar, moonlight, and a spoken sentence. ”

“ Another day, the sixth of the interminable gale. Will it never end? The wind and drift continue with unabated violence. For some three hours to-day, I pushed, and butted, and at times almost crawled on hands and knees, back and forth across the small floe on which we are camped. ”

“ When at dayspring he is dappled with spots and sunk in a mist, and his orbed centre retires, mistrust thou of showers; for a gale is bearing hard from seaward, ill-ominous for trees and crops and herds. ”

“ You notice a strange garish glitter in the air. The gale drives wildly overhead with a fierce, tempestuous roar, but its violence is not felt, for you are looking through a sheltered opening in the woods as through a window. ”

“ The clouds come sailing over, flinging their shadows to the plains,—shadows wavering down the mountain-sides with an indescribable sweet tremulousness, scudding over the lower summits, pursued by some frolicsome gale which we do not see, or resting softly in the dells, whose throbbing soothes itself to stillness in the grateful shade. ”

“ Parched are all lips and eyes; for the air is full of dust, yea, even of gravel which cuts like hail. Aching are all right-sides; for the sudden chill brings on all manner of liver complaints and indigestions. All who can afford it, draw tight the jalousies, and sulk in darkness; the leaves are parched, as by an Atlantic gale; the air is filled with lurid haze, as in an English north-east wind; and no man can breathe freely, or eat his bread with joy, until the plague is past. ”

“ At times this gale became a sirocco in temperature, concentrating its heat in withering blasts which they could not face, or focusing its intensity upon some mass of foliage that seemed to shrink at its touch and open a scathed and quivering aisle to its approach. ”

“ It blows a snowing gale in the winter of the year;
The boats are on the sea and the crews are on the pier.
The needle of the vane, it is veering to and fro,
A flash of sun is on the veering of the vane.
⁠Autumn leaves and rain,
⁠The passion of the gale. ”

“ A furious gale had come on from E.S.E., which, as soon as I got on the open moorland, I found was driving clouds of snow and icy sleet before it. It was with considerable difficulty that I made my way up the western ascent of the hill, as I had to walk in the teeth of this gale. The force of the wind was most extraordinary. ”

“ He remembered the gale that swallowed the thirteen houses. ’Twas a northerly gale, and that was the only quarter that Staithes had to trouble about. Whenever the wind blew hard from the north, the Cod and Lobster had to get ready to run. But the easterly gales, which made everything outside run for shelter, never touched the place, and you might row round the port in a skiff when collier ships were carrying away their topmasts in the offing, or drifting helplessly ashore. ”

“ The gale is said to blow amorously when it strikes deliciously, satisfying his desire who is longing for the refreshing which it ministers; for it then revives and soothes the sense of touch, and while the sense of touch is thus soothed, that of hearing also rejoices and delights in the sound and whisper of the gale more than the touch in the contact of the air, because the sense of hearing is more spiritual, or, to speak with greater correctness, is more nearly connected with the spiritual than is that of touch, and the delight thereof is more spiritual than is that of the touch. ”

“ Gale followed gale; and an occasional alarm of a disruption in the ice, a bear or seal hunt, formed our only excitement; indeed, we sometimes hoped for some crisis, were it only to break the dreadful monotony of our lives. Our walks abroad afforded us no recreation ”

“ Gale itself is a sufficiently tangible reality, to be sure, but it is a purely local disease of the skin, due to a perfectly definite cause, and the dire internal conditions formerly ascribed to it have really no causal connection with it whatever. ”

“ Which, to my Baronite, suggests the difficulty that, if the minister fans the lady with his shadowy pinions "gently," he will fail to produce anything resembling a "midnight gale"; on the other hand, if he performs the part of invisible punkah so energetically as to suggest a gale, he can hardly help awakening her unless she is a very heavy sleeper indeed—and might give her a cold in the head. ”

“ CLARENCE A little gale will soon disperse that cloud
And blow it to the source from whence it came:
The very beams will dry those vapours up,
For every cloud engenders not a storm. ”

“ The yard at length came down safe, and, after it, the fore and mizzen royal yards were sent down. All hands were then sent aloft, and for an hour or two we were hard at work, making the booms well fast, unreeving the studding-sail and royal and skysail gear, getting rolling-ropes on the yard, setting up the weather breast-backstays, and making other preparations for a storm. It was a fine night for a gale; just cool and bracing enough for quick work, without being cold, and as bright as day. It was sport to have a gale in such weather as this. ”

“ After expending their force for three days, they are usually succeeded by a sharp southerly gale, which is frequently accompanied with rain, and soon makes every thing not actually blighted look green again. ”

“ The fifth day after the commencement of the storm, we shook a reef out of each topsail, and set the reefed foresail, jib, and spanker, but it was not until after eight days of reefed topsails that we had a whole sail on the ship, and then it was quite soon enough, for the captain was anxious to make up for leeway, the gale having blown us half the distance to the Sandwich Islands. Inch by inch, as fast as the gale would permit, we made sail on the ship, for the wind still continued ahead, and we had many day's sailing to get back to the longitude we were in when the storm took us. ”

“ Continual and frequently violent gales, always blowing in the same quarter, sweep the surface of the ground. The sun, though it rarely appears, nevertheless exercises its influence on the atmosphere, which is apt to produce disorders of the liver, if due precaution be not observed. ”

“ Upon the seas, though with a gentle gale. ”

“ Let the winds blow! a fiercer gale
Is wild within me! what may quell
That sullen tempest? I must sail
Whither, O whither, who can tell! ”

“ A fresher gale
Begins to wave the wood, and stir the stream, ⁠1650
Sweeping with shadowy gust the fields of corn;
While the quail clamours for his running mate. ”

“ Gale, perhaps more truly and constantly than the verse of any of our younger living poets, stands the Miltonic test of poetry, in proving itself "simple, sensuous, passionate."'—From The Poets and Poetry of the Century. ”

“ Walter Gale, the object of the choice at Mayfield, and the writer of the journal from which the following extracts are taken, was not such an one as Joseph Moxon, who, having acted as waiter at his father's inn at Market Bosworth, was placed by the patron of the school there at the head of it, despite of all his own earnest remonstrances and protestations of incompetency. On the contrary, he was a sort of universal genius: he could turn his hand to almost anything ”

“ When the people of Chorley, in Lancashire, built their schoolhouse, they recorded this their resolution, that no schoolmaster or minister who might hereafter be, should, for "diverse great causes, inhabit therein;" the real "great cause" being, as was afterwards explained, that the wives, and children begotten in such habitation, might become chargeable to the parish. This difficulty, as far as Walter Gale was concerned, was obviated by the selection of a single man, who dwelt with his mother at a place called Coggin's Mill, near Mayfield. ”

“ Even if there is, even if love is unchanging, the very temper of unconcern of his valet might be quite as persistent as love itself. But the gallery emptying itself into a great court open to the blue among graven rafters, St. George promptly threw his doubt to the fresh, heaven-kissing wind that smote their faces, and against mystery and argument and age alike he matched only the happy clamour of his blood. Olivia Holland was on the island, and all the age was gold. In Yaque or on the continents there can be no manner of doubt that this is love, as Love itself loves to be. ”

“ Far to the north and calls his ruffian blasts:
His blasts obey and quit the howling hill,
The shatter'd forest, and the ravag'd vale;
While softer gales succeed, at whose kind touch,15
Disolving snows in livid torrents lost,
The mountains lift their green heads to the sky. ”

“ At all events there were the walls of the great airy rooms made of the naked stone, exquisitely beveled and chiseled, and frescoed with the planetary deities—Eloti, the Moon with her chariot drawn by white bulls, the Sun and his four horses, with his emblem of a column in the form of a rising flame—types taken from the heavens and from the abyss. ”

“ When the shadows had quite fallen and the young lover was gone, and Enid had slipped away to her room to dream alone, Pelleas and I sat long over the fire beside the deserted tea-table. Nicola's rose, fading on my lace, gave out a heavenly fragrance, and the room was filled with little spirits and presences to which the perfume was akin—young hope, young prayer, young dreams. ”

“ For these Orwoods and he and Andrea had all been shamed by the crude literal child and by Mrs. West herself.
"God help me!" said Simon, and lay down on the tall, dry grass. Life pressed upon him like a weight, as if life were but a mode of death. ”

“ Here, from the dimness of the marge of the island, they gradually emerged into the beginnings of the faint light. It was not like entering upon dawn, or upon the moonlight. It was by no means like going to meet the lights of a city. It was literally "a light better than any light that ever shone," and it wrapped them round first like a veil and then like a mantle. Dimly, as if released from the censer-smoke of a magician's lamp, boughs and glades, lines and curves were set free of the dark; and St. George and Amory could see about them. ”

“ She looked away to the open space where the white cloth glimmered ready for the feast, and she saw the little old lady, her shawl thrown aside, her bonnet slipped back, standing close to a great tree and looking up, up to the distracting depths of pure blue, the wind fanning her white curls, a half-eaten cake in her ungloved hand, a little smile on her lips. ”

“ If one can remember some journey that he has taken long ago—Long Ago and Far Away are the great touchstones—and can remember the glamourie of the hour and forget the substructure of events, if he can recall the pattern and forget the fabric, then he will understand the spirit that informed that first morning in Yaque. It was a morning all compact of wonder and delight—wonder at that which half-revealed itself, delight in the ever-present possibility that here, there, at any moment, Olivia Holland might be met. ”

“ In its glamourie, with that far ocean background, the palace of pale stone looked unearthly, a sky thing, with ramparts of air. The principle of the builders seemed not to have been the ancient dictum that "mass alone is admirable," for the great pile was shaped, with beauty of unknown line, in three enormous cylinders, one rising from another, the last magnificently curved to a huge dome on whose summit burned with inconceivable brilliance the light which had been a beacon to the longing eyes turned toward it from the deck of The Aloha. ”

“ The fever struck her, without any illness, just as the plague and the cholera have done, with a headlong, concentrated leap; as a thunderstorm gathers itself sometimes into one blue ball of lightning. ”

“ It was amphitheatre-shaped, and about it ran a splendid colonnade, in the niches of whose cornices were beautiful grotesques—but Yaque seemed to be a land whose very grotesques had all the dignity of the ultimate instead of crying for the indulgence due a phase. The roof was inlaid with prisms of clear stone, and on high were pilasters carved with the Tyrian sphinxes crucified upon upright crosses, surmounted by parhelions of burnished metal. All the seats faced a great dais at the chamber's far end where three thrones were set. ”

“ THOUGH the sun was warm on the golden-gray meadow slope, it was not there that the little shepherdess loved to lead her flock. The crests of the hills were swimming in soft light, and breaths from flowered orchards yielded their way over the hills, but it was not there either that she lay in the long mornings. For it is the great green lowlands of Wales that are richest with early Spring magic, and it was in a magic lowland, hill-cradled, that Llorien fed her white flock in Spring. ”

“ And so did Sonia. For a moment, as the door of the box closed upon her, she stood breathless, dazzled by the lights, by the stir in the pit, by the shining of the great splendid horseshoe of boxes of which she found herself a part; the next, she had stepped boldly forward and sunk in the depths of a plump, hospitable fauteuil of dark velvet, her cloak falling in a blur of rose about the slim grace of her little figure in its mist of white. ”