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Ebb   /ɛb/   Listen
Ebb

noun
1.
A gradual decline (in size or strength or power or number).  Synonyms: ebbing, wane.
2.
The outward flow of the tide.  Synonym: reflux.



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"Ebb" Quotes from Famous Books



... like any other hoard that ever was or ever will be. The cuckoo calling over the valley, the blackbird fluting in the low boughs in the evening, the solemn majesty of the Abbey, the life of the streets, the ebb and flow of Father Thames—everything whispers to us some secret that it has for no other ear, and touches a chord of memory that echoes in no other brain. Those deeps within us find only a crude expression in ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)

... called the Eastern Passage, in a sudden fog and through the pilot's folly. We had struck upon a mud-bank, and driven into a perfect little pond, surrounded by banks and rocks and shoals of all kinds: the only safe speck in the place. Eased by this report, and the assurance that the tide was past the ebb, we turned in at three o'clock in the morning, to lie there ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster

... mind has its ebb and flow of disquiet, with intervals of peace between. At length—how long, though, he could not have said—he came to the conclusion that the affair was an accident or mistake. The palace certainly belonged to somebody; it must have care and keeping: and the keeper ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace

... King Canute discovered, are beyond mortal control. The Telemachus goes out with the ebb. And, after all, for our purposes surely no hour could be more suitable. If I come for Dick at midnight tomorrow that will just give us time to get him snugly aboard before she sails. I have made all arrangements with Glennie. ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini

... which people climb to make pilgrimages to the Moulin Rouge and the church of St. Pierre de Montmartre. In New York it has been moved not only across that river of human intercourse that we call Broadway—a river with a tidal ebb and flow of travel and traffic—but across a wilder, stranger, and more turbulent flood called the Bowery, to a region of which the well-fed and prosperous New Yorker ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner

... means, and particularly at the greatest height of the tide, the shingles are projected on the land beyond the reach of the retiring waves: and this great accumulation of land upon beach being effected at high water, it is clear, the ebb tide cannot deprive the land of what it has gained. Smaller lines are formed in moderate weather, to be swept away by heavy gales: hence it would appear, that the sea was diminishing the beach; but attention will show that the shingles of the lines so apparently swept away, are but accumulated elsewhere. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 560, August 4, 1832 • Various

... Indeed it was sometimes only through a little lane with several turnings, which looked as if it had been sawn out for him, that he could reach his bed at all. For the stock of hay was, of course, always in a state either of slow ebb or of sudden flow. Sometimes the whole space of the loft, with the little panes in the roof for the stars to look in, would lie open before his open eyes as he lay in bed; sometimes a yellow wall of sweet-smelling fibres closed up his view at the distance of half a yard. Sometimes, ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • George MacDonald

... doubt thy mystic lore, Nor question that the tenor of my life, Past, present, and the future, is revealed There in my horoscope. I do believe That yon dead moon compels the haughty seas To ebb and flow, and that my natal star Stands like a stern-browed sentinel in space And challenges events; nor lets one grief, Or joy, or failure, or success, pass on To mar or bless my earthly lot, until It proves its Karmic right ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... said, caressing him. "Now, darling." His trembling began to ebb. She said: "Let's get out the spools, Tommy. You mustn't fall behind in school. You owe that ...
— The Adventurer • Cyril M. Kornbluth

... dresses gravitated about him and his entourage, women representing all the strata heaved 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 ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston

... Grant were partners, trail mates, brothers in soul if not in blood. The ebb and flood of frontier life had brought them together, its hardships had united them until they were as one. They were something of a mystery to each other, neither having surrendered all his confidence, and because of this they retained their mutual attraction. They ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various

... means a comforting state of affairs, and Guy's spirits were at their lowest ebb as the steamer finally faded into the horizon. He put up the glasses and strode forward. From the lower deck came a confused babel of sounds, a harsh jabbering of foreign languages that grated roughly ...
— The River of Darkness - Under Africa • William Murray Graydon

... trebly unsettled, yet no card seemed to turn up favourable to the royal cause, until the movement of General Monk from Scotland. Even then, it was when at the point of complete success, that the fortunes of Charles seemed at a lower ebb than ever, especially when intelligence had arrived at the little Court which he then kept in Brussels, that Monk, on arriving in London, had put himself under ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott

... things are too well known to require repetition. And do you ask for fortitude, energy, and perseverance? Then look at woman under suffering, reverse of fortune, and affliction, when the strength and power of man have sunk to the lowest ebb, when his mind is overwhelmed by the dark waters of despair. She, like the tender ivy plant bent yet unbroken by the storms of life, not only upholds her own hopeful courage, but clings around the tempest-fallen oak, to speak hope to his faltering spirit, and shelter him from the returning ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... along the shore to search for them, got himself embayed in the mouth of a small river, swollen by recent rains, and upon the sudden subsidence of the water coincident with the ebb of the tide, his ship took ground, fell over on her bilge and was completely wrecked. The men on board barely escaped with their lives to the shore. They had saved nothing except what they wore, the few arms they ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady

... the tide we'll go to sea on the same ebb," he said, as he lay down on his state-room locker and composed ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman

... 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 ...
— Memories and Studies • William James

... like the good-natured old man that I am, I was led like a lamb to the slaughter. And how I regretted it afterward! I am cynical enough, forsooth, but what I heard that afternoon surpassed my comprehension. I knew that artistic matters were at a low ebb in New York, yet I never realized the lowness thereof until then. I was introduced to a half-dozen smartly dressed men, some beardless, some middle-aged, and all dissipated looking. They regarded me with ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker

... process may be compared to the flood of a very rapid tide, which, after the first few hours, is seen to relax its speed considerably, and to promise in the immediate future an ebb. ...
— A General Sketch of the European War - The First Phase • Hilaire Belloc

... and done about human greatness, it is always the greatness of the few. Ages pass, and leave the poor herd, the mass of men, eternally the same,—hewers of wood and drawers of water. The pomp of princes has its ebb and flow, but the peasant sells his fruit as gayly to the stranger on the ruins as to the emperor in ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... children and wives full control of their property and earnings. The only concession that had been made to the steady demand of the women for suffrage was the grant of the School franchise in 1893 and eligibility to the school boards. Interest in woman suffrage was at a low ebb when the new century opened. The membership of the association had decreased and at the State convention in Hartford in 1901 the treasurer's report for the year showed an expenditure of only $21.75. The report of the president and ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various

... 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 be accepted in a scientific sense without an involved ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various

... a hint from Roger Chillingworth, the friends of Mr. Dimmesdale effected an arrangement by which the two were lodged in the same house; so that every ebb and flow of the minister's life-tide might pass under the eye of his anxious and attached physician. There was much joy throughout the town when this greatly desirable object was attained. It was held to be the best possible measure for ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... this way that the world began to hear of Mr. Nathaniel Hawthorne, of Salem; but it was still long before the public knew him. Meanwhile, at the very moment of the disclosure, he was in the lowest ebb of discouragement, in spirits, that he ever knew. It is to this time that his gloomiest memories attached themselves. He had tried to enter the world, he had even tried to earn a living, and had failed. Cilley, his old college mate, was just elected to Congress from Maine, ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry

... found our soundings decreased to three fathom and a half: But the pilot assuring us that this was the least depth we should meet with, we continued our course, till at length the ship stuck fast in the mud, with only eighteen feet water abaft; and, the tide of ebb making, the water sewed to sixteen feet, but the ship remained perfectly upright; we then sounded all round us, and finding the water deepened to the northward, we carried out our small bower with two hawsers an end, and at the return of the tide of flood, hove the ship afloat, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr

... friend to dinner, and gave her some help; but as they did not know the extent of her debts, they did not dare to sound the depths of that gulf. An interval of six years formed rather too long a gap in the ebb and flow of the Paris tide, between La Torpille and Madame du Val-Noble, for the woman "on foot" to speak to the woman in her carriage; but La Val-Noble knew that Esther was too generous not to remember sometimes ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac

... I have observed that the tide rises and falls twice every twenty-four hours, and that the ebb and flow produce a rather swift current through the submarine tunnel. It is pretty certain therefore that a floating object thrown into the lagoon when the top of the orifice is uncovered would be carried ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne

... have a horrible thought which you bury in the depths of your heart and conscience: Caroline has not come up to your expectations. Caroline has imperfections, which, during the high tides of the honey-moon, were concealed under the water, but which the ebb of the gall-moon has laid bare. You have several times run against these breakers, your hopes have been often shipwrecked upon them, more than once your desires—those of a young marrying man—(where, alas, is ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac

... paces further Torquil leaned his head Against a bank, and spoke not, but he bled,— Not mortally:—his worst wound was within; His brow was pale, his blue eyes sunken in, 100 And blood-drops, sprinkled o'er his yellow hair, Showed that his faintness came not from despair, But Nature's ebb. Beside him was another, Rough as a bear, but willing as a brother,— Ben Bunting, who essayed to wash, and wipe, And bind his wound—then calmly lit his pipe, A trophy which survived a hundred fights, A beacon which had cheered ten thousand nights. The fourth ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron

... executors of Peter Cooper should build on his grave a monument that would cost $20,000,000, it would not so well commemorate him as that monument at the junction of Third and Fourth Avenues, New York. How few people would pass along the silent sepulcher as compared with those great numbers that will ebb and flow around Cooper Institute in the ages to come! Of the tens of thousands to be educated there, will there be one so stupid as not to know who built it, and what a great heart he had, and how he struggled to achieve a fortune, but always mastered that fortune, and never allowed the ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller

... who 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 Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler

... A short period of slack water, and the ebb bears us seaward, past the Cowal shore, glinting in the wintry sunlight, the blue smoke in Dunoon valley curling upward to Kilbride Hill, past Skelmorlie Buoy (tolling a doleful benediction), past Rothesay Bay, with the misty Kyles beyond. The Garroch Head, with ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone

... and looked about them at the other passengers with looks of lazy surprise, and just a hint of scorn for their interest in the boat's departure. Our day's pleasurers took it that the lady whose steady gaze had reduced them, when at lunch, to such a low ebb of shabbiness, was a regular boarder, at the least, in one of the beach hotels. A few other passengers were, like themselves, mere idlers for a day, and were eager to see all that the boat or the voyage offered ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells

... heavenward like a cork, and then dashed him down once more, a passive burden, on some soft and yielding substance, which he conjectured at once to be a beach of finely powdered coral fragments. As he touched this beach for an instant, the undertow of that vast dashing breaker sucked him back with its ebb again, a helpless, breathless creature; and then the succeeding wave rolled him over like a ball, upon the beach as before, in quick succession. Four times the back-current sucked him under with its wild pull ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen

... Religions, arts, tradings, philosophies, vices and laws have been borne, a strange flotsam, upon its unchanging flood. It has had its springs and neaps, its trembling high-water marks, its hour of affluence, when the world has been flooded with golden humanity; its ebb and effluence also, when it has seemed to shrink and desert the kingdoms set upon its shores. The fifteenth century in Western Europe found it at a pause in its movements: it had brought the trade and the learning of the East to the verge of the Old World, ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young

... 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 ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton

... than ever full of picturesque, when on questioning other mariners who were on movement up and down the river that hour, he found that few of them had seen any of fog at all, except where it lay round the wharf. However, the ship went out on the ebb tide, and was doubtless by morning far down the river mouth. She was then, when they told us, ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker

... of this Diary were printed no note was required here. Before the erection of the present London Bridge the fall of water at the ebb tide was great, and to pass at that time was called "Shooting the bridge". It was very hazardous for small boats. The ancient mode, even in Henry VIII.'s time, of going to the Tower and Greenwich, was to land at the Three ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys

... gleamed of a sudden from the Sutherland's main-mast. It was the signal for sixteen hundred men to drop quietly into their boats. A long interval of silence and suspense then followed, till at two o'clock the tide began to ebb, when a second lantern glimmered from Wolfe's ship. The boats now pushed off and drifted quietly down in long procession under the deep shadow ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various

... he should call her or want for anything. But the hours wore on peacefully for him till the moon began her downward course towards the west, and the tide having rolled in to its highest mark, began to ebb and flow out again. Then—all at once—he awoke—smitten by a shock of pain that seemed to crash through his heart and send his brain swirling into a blind chaos. Struggling for breath, he sprang up in his bed, and instinctively snatched the handbell at his side. He ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli

... 1898. — It is high tide, and three o'clock in the afternoon when we leave the Battery quay; the ebb carries us off shore, and as Captain Huntly has hoisted both main and top sails, the north- erly breeze drives the Chancellor briskly across the bay. Fort Sumter ere long is doubled, the sweeping batteries of the mainland on our left are soon passed, ...
— The Survivors of the Chancellor • Jules Verne

... the accession of Artaxerxes there is at once a revival of art. Art had sunk under the Parthians, despite their Grecian leanings, to the lowest ebb which it had known in Western Asia since the accession of Asshur-izir-pal to the throne of Assyria (B.C. 886). Parthian attempts at art were few and far between, and when made were unhappy, not to say ridiculous. The coins of Artaxerxes, ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson

... right," was the refrain that brought solace in the darkest hours. A blessing for him that this was so, for he had little else to brighten his days. Negotiations looking to the sale of the land were usually in progress. When the pressure became very hard and finances were at their lowest ebb, it was offered at any price—at five cents an acre, sometimes. When conditions improved, however little, the price suddenly advanced even to its maximum of one thousand dollars an acre. Now and then a genuine offer came along, but, though eagerly ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... frontiers of Russia. The splendid patriotism of 'Life for the Czar' (1836), his most famous work, endears him to the hearts of his countrymen. The scene of the opera is laid in the seventeenth century, when the Poles held Moscow and the fortunes of Russia were at the lowest ebb. Michael Fedorovich Romanov has just been elected Czar, and upon him the hopes of the people are centred. The Poles are determined to seize the person of the Czar, and some of them, disguised as ambassadors, summon the peasant Ivan Sussaninna to guide them to his retreat. Ivan sacrifices his life ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild

... then, as they see now, a champion in Austria. He was the victim of circumstances, and he had to bow before them, in order that he might finally become their master. Then he had no occasion for a quarrel with Austria. She was at the lowest ebb her fortunes had known since the day that the Turks appeared for the second time before Vienna. She could not have maintained herself in Italy, even after the successes of Radetzky, had not Nicholas sent one hundred and fifty thousand men to her assistance in Hungary. What had France ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various

... And so, it is ebb-time, they turn, the eyes beneath the busbies are gone. But the blood has suspended its timbre, the heart from out of oblivion Knows but the retreat of the burning shoulders, the red-swift waves of the sweet Fire horizontal declining and ebbing, ...
— Bay - A Book of Poems • D. H. Lawrence

... here the germ of an idea which may hereafter enable us to solve one of the most interesting and important of engineering problems, viz., the utilization of the great store of power provided for us twice daily in the ebb and flow of the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various

... have been at rather a low ebb when I first encountered it in London. Men breakfasted in public, as we have just seen, in order to indulge in it; and I remember a terrible Club where it raged on two nights of every week, in a large, dark, and draughty room, while men sat round an indifferent fire, drinking ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell

... but requested to be bled to death: The surgeon had his instruments, and bled Pedrillo, and so gently ebb'd his breath, You hardly could perceive when he was dead. He died as born, a Catholic in faith, Like most in the belief in which they 're bred, And first a little crucifix he kiss'd, And then held out his ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron

... It used to be at this point, where the Strait was narrowest, that horned cattle were driven down, preparatory to swimming them across the channel to the Caernarvon side, when the tide was weak and at its lowest ebb. The cattle were, nevertheless, often carried away, the current being too strong for the animals ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles

... Park Street near the Five Points Mission, but they have not been used as living-rooms for a generation. In cellars near the river the tide rose and fell, compelling the tenants "to keep the children in bed till ebb-tide." The plumber had come upon the field, but his coming brought no relief. His was not a case of conscience. "Untrapped soil pipes opened into every floor and ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis

... or in green as you choose, they will take to their heels just the same. One says peace and the other war, but neither means anything, there is only universal servitude, multitudes swept along like the ebb and flow of tides; and this will continue as long as no strong souls raise themselves above the human ocean, as long as no one dares to fight against the fate that sways these ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain

... A stranger among my own country people, with the every-day habits and every-day pleasures of my youthful life left behind me—without plans or hopes to interest me in looking at the future—it is surely not wonderful that my spirits had sunk to their lowest ebb, and that I even failed to appreciate with sufficient gratitude the fortunate ...
— The Guilty River • Wilkie Collins

... our conscience riding on the topmost surface-waves, they are propitious intervals, if we choose to make the best of them, or they may only be fitful breaks in the glad monotony of our sensual, easy-going lives—breaks, that our evil tendencies most often survive, seeing them rise, and surge, and ebb, in fearless defiance, and then quietly resuming their old sway, when the moral ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"

... this narrow strip or Hermes of a state is the Nanticoke, which, like a crack in the wall,—and the same blow fractured the image on the mantel,—flows with breadth and tidal ebb and flow from the Chesapeake Bay through the Eastern Shore of Maryland into Delaware, and is there formed of two tidal sources, the one to the north continuing to be called the Nanticoke, and that to the south—nearly as imposing ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend

... clear and still, like a pool on a land river; only there was a difference in the weeds and fishes, and the water itself was green instead of brown; but when the tide went out, in the bottom of the ebb, there was a day or two in every month when you could pass dryshod from Aros to the mainland. There was some good pasture, where my uncle fed the sheep he lived on; perhaps the feed was better because the ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the Christmas-eve,— The game of forfeits done—the girls all kiss'd Beneath the sacred bush and past away— The parson Holmes, the poet Everard Hall, The host, and I sat round the wassail-bowl, 5 Then half-way ebb'd: and there we held a talk, How all the old honour had from Christmas gone, Or gone, or dwindled down to some odd games In some odd nooks like this; till I, tired out With cutting eights that day upon the pond, 10 Where, three times slipping ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson

... Hill, they got six months' rest; which was even better. In those days, apart from sieges, a battle was an event, here it is the rest or respite that is an event. Even British soldiers can't stick day and night fighting for ever. The attack spirit begins to ebb unless it is fed with fresh blood. Whether K.'s mind, big with broad views, grasps this new factor with which he has never himself come into personal contact, God knows. But for his sake, every bit as much as for ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton

... 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 ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren

... in her little 'Chateau Joyeux' of La Favorite, and in the many beautiful properties which belonged to this extravagant Land-despoiler. She came to Wuerttemberg when the country was at a low financial ebb. Louis XIV. had preyed upon the land for years. Robber raids they called these wars which he waged for trumped-up pretexts. After these invasions came the war of the Spanish succession, and Wuerttemberg lying on the high-road from France to Austria, the belligerent armies swept over ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay

... Spread to the wind her sails she broad unbound, And at the helm sat down to govern it, Swelled the flood that all his banks he drowned To bear the greatest ship of burthen fit; Yet was her fatigue little, swift and light, That at his lowest ebb bear it ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso

... and her work were destroyed: if she resisted, they were equally destroyed, through the nervous disturbance and the intense depression which followed the winning of a liberty too dearly bought. The incessant rising and quelling of her impulse and her courage—like the ebb and flow of tides—represented a vast amount of force not merely wasted, but expended in producing a dangerous wear and tear upon the system. The process told upon her health, and was the beginning of the weakening and unbalancing of the splendid constitution ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird

... up systematically in Great Britain in the eighth century by King Offa, to whom is credited the maxim, "He who would be secure on land must be supreme at sea"; but it must have dropped to a low ebb by 1066, for William of Normandy landed in England unopposed. Since that time Great Britain's naval defense, committed to her navy, has increased steadily in effectiveness and power, keeping pace with the increase in the ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske

... which the tidal waves from the two different directions meet, one arriving approximately twelve hours later than the other, thus forming tides which are a result of the amalgamation of the two waves. On the ebb tide the direction of ...
— The Sewerage of Sea Coast Towns • Henry C. Adams

... who came to make experiments on the poor, for the benefit of the rich. One of the physicians, I must not forget to mention, gave me half-a-crown, and ordered me some wine, when I was at the lowest ebb. I thought of making my case known to the lady-like matron; but her forbidding countenance prevented me. She condescended to look on the patients, and make general enquiries, two or three times a week; but the nurses knew the hour when the visit of ceremony would ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft

... misery and violence, which began in May, 1798, and its repression, we may pass over, coming to their political consequences. It is admitted on all hands that the morality and religion of England reached their lowest ebb at this very time; we are, therefore, ready to learn that the Act of Union between England and Ireland, which followed on the heels of this insurrection, was carried by unlimited bribery and corruption. The ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston

... the wonderful silver tree of Tlemcen, covered with birds, who, by the action of wind, were made to produce the songs of each different species which they represented, till a falcon on the topmost branch uttered a harsh cry, and all became silent. General education had, however, fallen to a low ebb among the population, and the wisdom of the ancients was chiefly concentrated among the higher class of Marabouts, whose headquarters were at Bugia, and their present chief, Hadji Eseb Ben Hassan, had the reputation of a ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge

... room, pallid and insane? or suppose she should die of her troubles? What if she should kill herself?—dismiss the servants, and close the house, and lock herself up with a knife? Then she would cut her arm to escape from dismay at what she had already done; and then her courage would ebb away with her blood, and, having so far pledged herself to despair, her life would ebb away with her courage; and then, alone, in darkness, with none to help her, she would vainly scream, and thrust the knife into her ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various

... clouds were fled, Driven by a keen north-wind, that, blowing dry, Wrinkled the face of deluge, as decayed; And the clear sun on his wide watery glass Gazed hot, and of the fresh wave largely drew, As after thirst; which made their flowing shrink From standing lake to tripping ebb, that stole With soft foot towards the deep; who now had stopt His sluces, as the Heaven his windows shut. The ark no more now floats, but seems on ground, Fast on the top of some high mountain fixed. And now ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton

... is a matter for speculation. The idea 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 under discipline, militates against the idea that ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells

... palace, which opened on a smaller channel so near the Grand Canal that no wandering eye could fail to see it. The portal was a tall arch of Venetian gothic tipped with a carven flame; steps of white Istrian stone descended to the level of the lowest ebb, irregularly embossed with barnacles, and dabbling long fringes of soft green sea-mosses in the rising and falling tide. Swarms of water-bugs and beetles played over the edges of the steps, and crabs scuttled side-wise into deeper water at the approach of a gondola. A length of ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells

... to teach to, see, hear, and feel when the sense centers are most indelibly impressible, and to give relative rest to the hand during the years when its power of accuracy is abated and when all that is good is idealized furthest, and confidence in ability to produce is at its lowest ebb. ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall

... the long 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 ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young

... expected; and though Peel's party be a compact body, and formidable in the House of Commons, I cannot think that there appears that in the working of his measures to make it likely that he should be soon again carried into power on the shoulders of the people. I think his political reputation must ebb further before it can rise again, if it should ever rise again. * * * * thought him 'broken and in low spirits,' when he met him at Longshaw; but Lord * * * *, who was there at the same time, came away more Peelite than ever, and told them at Bretby that Sir Robert said, 'That he was quite surprised ...
— Lord George Bentinck - A Political Biography • Benjamin Disraeli

... I am proud to see, Stands not as others stood; The prospects of posterity Are really rather good, Now that my zeal (not on the ebb) Has borne ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, February 4, 1920 • Various

... collision, the encroachments and defeats of its constituent parts, so in like manner Catholic Christendom is no simple exhibition of religious absolutism, but presents a continuous picture of Authority and Private Judgment alternately advancing and retreating as the ebb and flow of the tide;—it is a vast assemblage of human beings with wilful intellects and wild passions, brought together into one by the beauty and the Majesty of a Superhuman Power,—into what may be called a large reformatory ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman

... lock-gates stowed away, Out of the great tides' ebb and flow, How could you guess, this many a day, Who was your leading naval foe? But now you learn, a little late— So loud the rumours from the sea grow— England's the thing you have to hate, And not ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 23, 1914 • Various

... 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

... night was well advanced, and the tide was running ebb-strong; so I asked. Captain Williamson to tow us up as near Fort McAllister as he would venture for the torpedoes, of which the navy-officers had a wholesome dread. The Dandelion steamed up some three or four miles, till the lights ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan

... by two reports of a committee of the General Court in 1782, their affairs were even then reduced to a low ebb. But under the arrangement announced by Mr. Hastings and his colleagues, it does not appear, after this period of the servants' investment, from what fund the proprietors are to make any dividend ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... heart as in 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 disappointed mind, he had quitted the land of his ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... efforts to make up lost 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 caught by ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... nether rim of that round, fiery orb was on the point of touching the line of distant hills, and it was casting a crimson glow along the white, snow-sheeted landscape that was singularly suggestive of a tide of blood—a very fitting tide to flow and ebb about the walls of ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini

... Third, and Fourth Avenues. The creek set in from the bay where the Gowanus Canal is retained, and rendered the marsh impassable at high-water as far as the line of Baltic Street. Blocks of buildings now stand on the site of mills that were once worked by the ebb and flow of the tides. The lower part of what is known as South Brooklyn was largely swamp land in 1776. Here the peninsula terminated in a nearly isolated triangular piece of ground jutting out into the harbor, called Red Hook, which figured prominently in the ...
— The Campaign of 1776 around New York and Brooklyn • Henry P. Johnston

... feet in the water. She heard the murmur and felt the cold caress of the sea, and, calmer now, could see the sombre and confused mass of the Raven on one side and on the other the long white streak of Molene sands that are left high above the dry bottom of Fougere Bay at every ebb. She turned round and saw far away, along the starred background of the sky, the ragged outline of the coast. Above it, nearly facing her, appeared the tower of Ploumar Church; a slender and tall pyramid shooting up dark and pointed into the clustered glitter of ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad

... cool place on the pillow; later she fell into a heavy, drugged sleep. He watched her till it was nearly light, brooding over her unconscious face. No thoughts of a king were his, I think; but once more he lapped them in that young girl's bosom, and let them sway, ebb and flow, with it. ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett

... him hours since he had entered the house. In reality, the time was short. As he had crossed the threshold, Beatrix had raised her head and looked at him dully. Then her reaction had come. Like the ebb and flow of the waves, excitement had followed apathy; and, as she had met his eyes, the wave had risen again and swept her away upon its tossing crest. Thayer was here at last. He never forgot her, never forsook her. He had come to her in this moment of her bitterest need, ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray

... emerald turf, and infatuated youths shall cross their slim, white-flannelled legs and hang upon the voice of their charmer. Not the pyramids themselves give me that sense of the continuity of the generations, the ebb and flow of youth and youth's hot loves and hot regrets and the inexorable twilight that makes placid middle age, as do those grey walls and blooming closes of what I sometimes think is the very heart's core of England. My mother's countrymen ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell

... with her feet. She stood upright. At the sound of Neal's voice all her fears vanished. She could see him now. He was stumbling down over the slippery stones which the ebb tide left bare. He reached the ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham

... palm, and lips her for his bride, Suffers collapse, and straightway doth become A hideous comment of mortality. Know this, my lord, while thou dost run from me, The tide of true love hath its hours of ebb, If the attendant orb withdraw his light; And though there be a love as strong as death, There is a pride stronger than death or love; And whether 'tis that I am royal born, Or kingly blooded, or that once I was Sometimes a mistress ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various

... past weeks appeared to be over for a time. The magnificent Union victories had brought gladness and hopefulness to Mr. Vosburgh, and the return of her friends had relieved his daughter's mind. He now thought he saw the end clearly. He believed that hereafter the tide of rebellion would ebb southward until all the ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe

... and left exposed for two or three hours. It does not appear in the form of a single mass or islet, but in a succession of serrated ledges of various heights, between and amongst which the sea flows until the tide has fallen pretty low. At full ebb the rock appears like a dark islet, covered with seaweed, and studded with deep pools of water, most of which are connected with the sea by narrow channels running between the ledges. The highest part of the rock does not rise more than seven ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne

... assertion must be made both with regard to goodness and with regard to truth. If any one of them absolutely overcame the other, so as completely to destroy it, the ebb and flow of life ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys

... the blessing of the Fire for him who brings it wood well dried, sought out for flaming, purified with the earnest blessing of the sacred ritual truth. We strive after the flowing on of the good waters, and their ebb as well, and the sounding of their waves, desiring their propitiation; I desire to ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various

... but only in the last sixty years has the preaching of 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. ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch

... we have fall'n on evil days, Such days as thou, not even thou didst know, When thee, the eyes of that harsh long ago Saw, salient, at the cross of devious ways, And all the country heard thee with amaze. Not ended then, the passionate ebb and flow, The awful tide that battled to and fro; We ride ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar

... air was genial, and a rapid trot Soon brought them to the beach. The ebb had left A level stretch of sand, wide, smooth, and hard, With not a hoof-mark on the glistening plain. The horses tossed their heads with snorting pride, Feeling the ocean breeze, as curved and fell Up the long line the creeping fringe of foam, ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent

... to recognize the impossible, and is deaf to all save 5 the clamor for battle. He called Hans and Pete to him. Their sacks were slim, and with his own the three partners could rake together only two hundred dollars. In the ebb of their fortunes, this sum was their total capital; yet they laid it unhesitatingly against Matthewson's ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell

... was that his tutor might be brought up and his head cut off. Then the scene changed to other situations, each very different, florid with details, but motivated by ending in the discomfiture of the tutor. In the ebb or ambivalent reaction of this passion he and ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10

... it becomes an easy matter for the natives to ascertain the height of the tide at any hour that the moon is visible. Whilst she appears to ascend the water falls and vice versa; the lowest of the ebb happening when she is in her meridian. The vulgar rule for calculating the tides is rendered also to Europeans more simple and practical from the same cause. There only needs to add together the epact, number of the month, and day of the month; the sum of which, if under thirty, ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden

... it was the silence before the storm. The courage which he had summoned up to meet a storm of disapproval, began to ebb slowly away in the face of this unnatural silence. It was clear that the onus of further speech was to ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... partakes of the order of falling leaves and autumnal oblivion. It may come softly as sleep when the day's work is done; it may come mercifully to end bodily pain and wretchedness. There are moments in every life when the ebb of physical force is so low that death seems but a step across the border—a change by which we desire to cure the weariness of thought. The soldier goes into battle charged with youth and life, buoyant with energy of muscle and nerve. Death seizes him at the noontide of life and leaves ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby

... account. His sudden and mysterious flight was very much against him, and his reputation was at a sudden ebb. Why did he go? Then Greer's name was mentioned, and Brown, and New Orleans; and it was talked over that night at Markham's with ominous mystery, and one wouldn't wonder if Bart had not gone to Jefferson, ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle

... Cordilleras, and the gorge where the Jiron came down, and where the mule path came down beside the river. The big wave went up to the foot of the hills, and now it came back peaceful. Then it was quiet everywhere, except for the sobbing of the ebb among the tree trunks, and afterward lower down in the bed of the river. The ground rose to the foothills there, and the channel of the river lay deep below, with a sandy bank maybe twenty feet high on either side, and on the bank above the river lay ...
— The Belted Seas • Arthur Colton

... definite right to be measured by—it had been easy, after the first slip, to drop a little lower with each struggle. The woman—oh, the woman was—well, of the kind who prey on such men. Arthur, out there, at his lowest ebb, had drifted into living with her as a man drifts into drink or opium. He knew what she was—he knew where she had come from. But he had fallen ill, and she had nursed him—nursed him devotedly, of course. That was her chance, and she knew it. Before he was out of the fever she had ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton

... face was serene as the gathering of the 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 cares of those they leave—a gulf ever widening between, ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald

... should always seize his opportunity; but the changes of the times in which he has lived have never allowed him to have one. There has been no period of flood in his tide which might lead him on to fortune. While he has been waiting patiently for high water the ebb has come upon him. Mr. Prendergast himself had been a successful man, and his regrets, therefore, were philosophical rather than practical. As for Herbert, he did not look upon the question at all in the same light ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope

... this is wisdom—to love and live, To take what fate or the gods may give, To ask no question, to make no prayer, To kiss the lips and caress the hair, Speed passion's ebb as we greet its flow, To have and to hold, and, ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... together, at the door, with the extinguished lamps hanging in their despairing hands. 'Too late, too late, ye cannot enter now.' The wedding bell has become a funeral knell. They were not the enemies of the bridegroom, they thought themselves his friends. They let life ebb without securing the one thing needful, and the neglect was irremediable. There is a tragedy underlying many a life of outward religiousness and inward emptiness, and a dreadful discovery will flare in upon such, when they have ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren

... 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 remain unassailable to the end. With every worldly advantage gone from her, with all prospect of ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins

... leading us a sublime march through the ancient glories of France, and in fancy we saw the titanic forms of the twelve paladins rise out of the mists of the past and face their fate; we heard the tread of the innumerable hosts sweeping down to shut them in; we saw this human tide flow and ebb, ebb and flow, and waste away before that little band of heroes; we saw each detail pass before us of that most stupendous, most disastrous, yet most adored and glorious day in French legendary history; here and there and yonder, across that vast field of the dead and dying, ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain

... taut, vibrated 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

... his health was very bad—and it must be borne in mind that, throughout all this experience, his physical condition was one of ebb—and he was in considerable distress by reason of the negligence, the positive ill-treatment even, he received from his wife and step-children. His wife was vain, extravagant, unfeeling, and had a growing taste for private drinking; his step-daughter ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells

... whose sturdy look Never left hers for long, whose shepherd's hook Seemed not a staff to prop him, whose bright eyes Burned steadily, as fire when the wind dies. Great in the girth was he, but not so tall By a full hand as many whom the wall Showed like gaunt channel-posts by an ebb tide Left stranded in a world of ooze. Beside His knees she kneeled, and to his wounded feet Applied her balms; but he, from his low seat Against the wall, leaned out and in her ear Whispered, but so that no one else could hear, ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett

... expresses elevated thought and refinement of spirit, in whatever form it manifests itself, is at its lowest ebb among the Sakais and especially representative art, although it is curious to notice how much more they prefer (I speak of the male sex) this latter to that of sounds. Music may procure some moments of bliss to those who yield themselves to its charms but it is transitory and, with them, leaves ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti

... which were so well known some years ago as "yellow covers." This style of fiction, now confined to the lowest class of readers, at that time found its way into almost every house, and the popular taste was at a very low ebb. The Harpers felt sure that by issuing the best, and only the best, English novels at a low price, they would not only meet a real want on the part of the public, but in great measure supersede the "yellow covers," with all their pernicious influences. The sequel ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.

... with the pulse of human life. Yet life in the veins of these people flowed slow and cool; their sorrows and joys were few and life-long. The enduring air suited this woman, Margret Howth. Her blood could never ebb or flow with sudden gusts of passion, like his own, throbbing, heating continually: one current, absorbing, deep, would carry its tide from one eternity to the other, one love or one hate. Whatever power was in the tide should be his, in its entirety. ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis

... It was using up his steam faster than he could manufacture it. Thereafter, Scraggs had used a patent foghorn, and when the honest McGuffey had once more succeeded in conserving sufficient steam to crawl up river, the tide had turned and the Maggie could not buck the ebb. McGuffey declared a few new tubes in the boiler would do the trick, but on the other hand, Mr. Gibney pointed out that the old craft was practically punk aft and a stiff tow would jerk the tail off the old girl. In despair, therefore, Captain Scraggs had abandoned bay and river towing and ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne

... instead of saying that a man is hard up, let us say that his organisation is at a low ebb, or, if we wish him well, let us hope that he will grow plenty of limbs. It must be remembered that we are dealing with physical organisations only. We do not say that the thousand-horse man is better than a one-horse man, we only say that he is more highly organised, and should be recognised ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler

... of it? You wish me to make a tragic story out of it? Why, in the police-reports of the morning paper you can find a dozen such tragedies: hints of shipwrecks unlike any that ever befell on the high seas; hints that here a power was lost to heaven,—that there a soul went down where no tide can ebb or flow. Commonplace enough the hints are,—jocose ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis

... streams, And never cries "enough!"—the human mind Would drain all sources of intelligence, Yet ne'er is filled, and never satisfied. And theory succeeds to theory As regular as tides that ebb and flow. This treatise will disprove the last I read. Shade of Hippocrates! what creeds are formed, What antics practiced with your "Healing Art!" I will not sport with fate, nor tamper thus With man's credulity and nature's ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various

... cared whose—and he was snoring unmelodiously, and not dreaming a thing; for when a cow-puncher has nothing in particular to do, he sleeps to atone for the weary hours when he must be very wide-awake. An avalanche descended upon his unwarned middle, and checked the rhythmic ebb and flow of sound. He squawked and came ...
— Rowdy of the Cross L • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B.M. Bower

... very softly of such a mighty man of God, and say it in fewest words, and only to help. He was a man of marvellous faith, and prayer, and bold daring, in the midst of a very crooked and perverse generation. Israel was at its very lowest moral ebb ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon

... to the light, my curiosity at a low ebb: I had seen Captain Trent once, and had no delight in viewing him again. It was a photograph of the deck of the brig, taken from forward: all in apple-pie order; the hands gathered in the waist, the officers on the poop. At the foot of the card was written, "Brig Flying Scud, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... from a village of that name in the vicinity of Padua, where he was born in the year 1250, was an eminent philosopher, mathematician and astrologer, but especially excelled in physic. Finding that science at a low ebb in his native country, he resorted to Paris, where it especially flourished; and after a time returning home, exercised his art with extraordinary success, and by this means ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin

... of the Alleghany Mountains in a fierce snow-storm, and early the next morning my troops led the way in the continuing storm over the summit. Shortly after the head of the column commenced the eastern descent, and when the chilling winter blasts had caused the lowest ebb of human enthusiasm to be reached, shouts were heard by me, at first indistinctly, then nearer and louder. This was so unusual and unexpected under the depressing circumstances that I ordered the column to halt until I ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer

... the latter to the messenger, who, in alarm, entered the room.—"'Tis Lord Cochrane's line-of-battle ship, in the very midst of our fleet."—"Impossible!" exclaimed the Admiral; "no large ship can have come up with the ebb tide." And there was as much consternation and as much bustle of preparation, as if the fleet of England had entered in a hostile manner. The Pedro Primeiro was indeed close alongside of the Constituica[)o]; but the Admiral disdained so small a prize, and pushed on to the Joam VI.; had he reached ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham

... (unimportant) 643; faint &c (weak) 160; slender, light, slight, scanty, scant, limited; meager &c (insufficient) 640; sparing; few &c 103; low, so-so, middling, tolerable, no great shakes; below par, under par, below the mark; at a low ebb; halfway; moderate, modest; tender, subtle. inappreciable, evanescent, infinitesimal, homeopathic, very small; atomic, corpuscular, microscopic, molecular, subatomic. mere, simple, sheer, stark, bare; near run. dull, petty, shallow, stolid, ungifted, unintelligent. Adv. to a small ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... except that his dwelling did not float with the flood- tide, and become stranded with the ebb, the young lord was nearly as comfortably accommodated as he was while on board the little trading brig from the long town of Kirkaldy, in Fife, by which he had come a passenger to London. He received, however, every attention which could be paid him by his honest landlord, John Christie; ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott

... authorship of Hippolytus, which is still disputed by some impartial critics, and was always rejected by Newman. Hippolytus und Kallistus, the high-water mark of Doellinger's official assent and concurrence, came out in 1853. His next book showed the ebb. ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... seemed to have reached its lowest ebb. The window looked out on a court,—a court that was never cleaned and where all manner of rubbish was thrown. Although it was morning and a brilliant, sunshiny day, the light within was so dim that it was hard to work by; yet with ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler



Words linked to "Ebb" :   hem in, flowing, besiege, surround, beleaguer, recede, tide, flow, diminution, fall back, decline, circumvent



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