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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.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Tidal wave" Quotes from Famous Books



... shocks being so frequent and severe that people abandoned their houses and slept on the open ground. The most destructive shocks came in September, when two Mission houses were destroyed and many of their inmates killed. At Santa Barbara a tidal wave invaded the coast and flowed some distance into ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various

... ourself away from it, the game which is so exciting as to cause us to forget all else in 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 ...
— How to Teach Religion - Principles and Methods • George Herbert Betts

... 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 ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou

... 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 little new-born babe left without the rightful ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... profoundly shaken by it, though 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

... Maldonado Bay a variety of fishes abound, and fur-seals in their season haul out on the island abreast the bay to breed. Currents on this coast are greatly affected by the prevailing winds, and a tidal wave higher than that ordinarily produced by the moon is sent up the whole shore of Uruguay before a southwest gale, or lowered by a northeaster, as may happen. One of these waves having just receded before the northeast wind which brought the Spray in left the tide now at low ebb, ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum

... between solid house-fronts, that forces cabs to move at half speed, that drowns policemen and extinguishes the electric lights of the music hall, that to me is incomprehensible. It is as out of place as a tidal wave on Broadway. ...
— In the Fog • Richard Harding Davis

... that Burroughs, possessing small faith in the impeccability of his fellow men, grew peevish at the delay in securing the requisite majority, while those who held Montana's best interests at heart breasted the tidal wave of ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman

... miles along the shore, where the lava entered the sea. The earthquakes caused some loss of human life, and a prodigious tidal wave swept inland, carrying every thing before it and drowning a number of natives. The devastation consummated along the route traversed by the river of lava was complete and incalculable. Only a Pompeii and a Herculaneum were needed ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... or "Diabutsa." It is a thousand years old and a horrible looking affair. I went up into the hollow image which is ninety-seven feet in diameter. I wanted to scratch the eyes out, for they are said to be made of solid gold. Years ago there was a temple over this image, so it is said, but a great tidal wave swept the building away. Now they are collecting money from tourists to erect another temple, so they say. They tackle every American for a subscription and strangely enough they get a lot of ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols

... of the South, called the Latin races, replying, after many centuries, to the invasion which had destroyed the Roman jurisdiction—the Mediterranean peoples spreading themselves as conquerors through the lands of the ancient barbarians. Retreating immediately, they had swept away the past like a tidal wave—the great surf depositing all that it contained. Like the waters of certain rivers which fructify by overflowing, this recession of the human tide had left the soil enriched with new and ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... the earthquake, upheaval of mountains, and, with mineralogy, the laws of crystallization. With chemistry, it analyzes, decomposes, and compounds the elements. If, like Canute, it cannot arrest the tidal wave, it is subjecting it to laws and formulas. Taking the sunbeam for its pencil, it pictures man's own image, and the scenery of the earth and the heavens. Has science any limits or horizon? Can it ever penetrate the soul of man, and reveal the mystery of his existence and destiny? ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 2, No 6, December 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... September and a tidal wave had swept over the southern ports. Coming in all the way from the tropics the storm had made itself felt over a great part of the world, in some places taking the ...
— The Bobbsey Twins at the Seashore • Laura Lee Hope

... humanity to think 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

... men to admire this sanctity and follow this example Paul had his own name. "The struggling stream of duty, which had not volume enough to bear man to his goal, was suddenly reinforced by the immense tidal wave of sympathy and emotion"; and to this new and potent influence Paul gave the name of faith. So vital is this word to Paul's religious doctrine that all Pauline theology and controversy has centred in it and battled round it. "To ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell

... an organ that enables us to communicate on an elemental level among ourselves without regard to mileage; and to probe psyches anywhere in the world—as many as we want. Actually, we have to keep his output at a fraction of capacity, or else get swamped in a tidal wave of emotion." ...
— Telempathy • Vance Simonds

... currents of wind, and now and then temporarily turned by eddies. I seem to look out upon a chaos of apparently conflicting forces. But all the time the wind and tide are sweeping me homeward. Now the wind, which sometimes indeed does shift, and the great tidal wave are steadily bearing me in a certain direction, though wave and eddy and gust may often make this appear doubtful to me. So, underneath all waves and eddies of environment, there is a great tidal wave, bearing man ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler

... such immediate disaster, such as that caused by a great storm in 1099, when, according to the Saxon Chronicle, many villages and churches were swept away. It was this storm, accompanied perhaps by a tidal wave, that converted the estates of Earl Godwin into the dreaded Goodwin Sands; and it may have caused tremendous damage, not definitely recorded, in the West. But another tradition attributes the formation of the islands to magic. It was said, by those who placed ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon

... 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

... all the objective. Yes, but though the British had arrived, as the signals showed, could they remain? It seemed almost too good to be true. And that hateful Trones Wood? Had we taken that, too, as a part of the tidal wave of a broad attack instead of trying to take ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer

... 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

... Saints' day, that the first shock was felt. This was soon followed by two others which laid the city in ruins, killing many people. Most who had escaped rushed to the river bank, where they with the splendid palace at the water's edge were all overwhelmed by an immense tidal wave. ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson

... this thought for convenience' sake, distinguish the progressive stages of the evolution of the Concrete from the Abstract by terms of which the "Mineral Monad" is one. The term merely means that the tidal wave of spiritual evolution is passing through that arc of its circuit. The "Monadic Essence" begins to imperceptibly differentiate in the vegetable kingdom. As the monads are uncompounded things, as correctly defined by Leibnitz, it is the spiritual ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various

... 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 without ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung

... the first blind. What does this little spray amount to? Then I began to marvel at the device. This was railroading! Talk about your primitive Western railroading—and just then the tender filled up, and it hadn't reached the end of the trough. A tidal wave of water poured over the back of the tender and down upon me. I was soaked to the skin, as wet as ...
— The Road • Jack London

... way to wonder. The thing fascinated you, against your will, dragged you back to the sidewalk and held you there open-eyed. No longer was it regiments of men marching, but something uncanny, inhuman, a force of nature like a landslide, a tidal wave, or lava sweeping down a mountain. It was not of this earth, but mysterious, ghostlike. It carried all the mystery and menace of a fog rolling toward you across the sea. The uniform aided this impression. In it each man moved under a cloak of invisibility. Only after the most ...
— With the Allies • Richard Harding Davis

... you go, Gloomy!" exclaimed Mr. Hadley. "First we know you'll be saying we'll all be smashed in a train wreck going to the coast; or, if not, that we'll be carried off by a tidal wave as ...
— The Moving Picture Boys on the Coast • Victor Appleton

... grave air he selected his rooms and accommodations to suit his swelling port, and even the club stewards nodded in recognition of the tidal wave of ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage

... east of that of Quito, or 42 deg. 30' past the lower meridian of Quito, assuming the longitude of Quito west of Greenwich to be 79 deg., which it is very nearly. This is but little after the vertex of the tidal wave should have passed the meridian of Quito, on the supposition that the interior of the earth is a liquid mass. The age of the moon at that time was 27.36 days, i.e., it was only about two days before new moon." At the time of the ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton

... with the suddenness of a conflagration, and, like a conflagration, there would be considerable destruction before it died down. The Indians in their savage temerity might strike Beacon Crossing. Once the Indians were loose it was like the breaking of a tidal wave on a low shore. ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum

... design 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 ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe

... But the sound did not die away. Instead, it deepened to a steady roar, growing every instant louder. His startled glance swept the canyon that drove like a sword cleft into the hills. Pouring down it, with the rush of a tidal wave, came a wall of cattle, a thousand backs tossing up and down as the swell of a troubled sea. Though he had never seen one before, the man on the lip of the gulch knew that he was watching a cattle stampede. ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine

... fellow-creatures has convinced me that Nature intended us all to be golfers. In every human being the germ of golf is implanted at birth, and suppression causes it to grow and grow till—it may be at forty, fifty, sixty—it suddenly bursts its bonds and sweeps over the victim like a tidal wave. The wise man, who begins to play in childhood, is enabled to let the poison exude gradually from his system, with no harmful results. But a man like Mortimer Sturgis, with thirty-eight golfless years behind ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse

... precision—the while murmuring "Ah! Ah!" in tones of rebuke. And thus, we are informed, was originated a name that was destined to be handed down to every reigning queen of the Rude Islands until the devastating tidal wave of 1889. ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward

... not foster extended loitering. It was far too busy a spot. About it swirled and surged an eddy of shoppers, all hurrying this way and that and jostling one another so mercilessly that he who did not make one of the current and move with the stream was all but exterminated. Like a tidal wave, the ruthless concourse swept past, bearing with it everything that obstructed its path. You went whether you would or no, and afterward you stepped into a doorway, caught your breath, straightened your hat, and tried to remember what it was ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett

... 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 fly-wheel ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various

... withdrawn from the River Gethe to hold Aerschot on its left stubbornly through August 14, 1914. Diest, St. Trond, and Waremme fell before the German tidal wave without resistance. Von Kluck's main army endeavored to sweep around the Belgian right at Wavre, but was checked for ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various

... dancing in the Gym. The spring days will be either cloudy, partly cloudy, or clear. It will rain dogs and cats or hail taxicabs, although we may have snow, a tornado, a cyclone, a blizzard, a squall, a typhoon, a tidal wave, or a ...
— The 1926 Tatler • Various

... was so insistent that it seemed to come from outside his consciousness, and to demand an answer. He stopped short in his walk as it struck him. Then, alone as he was, he colored to the temples, and gave a little gasp. Like an overwhelming tidal wave there swept over him the realization that his will was mastered by a power above it, mightier than itself; that his seeing Winifred Anstice again was hardly a question of volition any longer, any more than breathing was a matter of will—that he must see her—that ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin

... break 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

... of 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 fish for ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien

... of roseate flame leaped toward Powell from the projector. The laboratory was instantly blotted out in a swirling chaos of ruddy radiance that swept him up and away like a chip upon a tidal wave. There was a long moment during which he seemed to hurtle helplessly through a universe of swirling tinted mists, while great electric waves tingled with exquisite poignancy through every atom ...
— Devil Crystals of Arret • Hal K. Wells

... on his stool and thought if he must be an example every moment of his stay he would almost choose being swallowed up by a tidal wave at sea after all. The matter had been settled, however, and that very afternoon the Goodman set off on a hired horse, with his musket across his saddle-bow, and a head full of instructions from the Governor ...
— The Puritan Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins

... 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, ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang

... was a deep sound from outside. The procession was approaching. It came on like a great tidal wave and flowed into the vast place in the gathering darkness with the light of a hundred ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine

... This, however, does not mean restoration. The Government is not an insurer of its citizens against the hazard of the elements. We shall always have flood and drought, heat and cold, earthquake and wind, lightning and tidal wave, which are all too constant in their afflictions. The Government does not undertake to reimburse its citizens for loss and damage incurred under such circumstances. It is chargeable, however, with the rebuilding of public works and the humanitarian ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... merciless, and he was forced regretfully to obey the demands of his life's mission. All his ripeness of thought, all his philosophy, gleaned under the thin veneer of civilization, had been swept away by the tidal wave of battle. The original man hugged him to his bosom, and he rested ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum

... horizon, I saw the sea coming back. It occurred to me then that I did not wish it to come back. A tidal wave is nearly always wet, and I was now a good way from home, with no means ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)

... territory, and unparalleled, so far as I know, in the world. Shut off from sympathy with external conditions by the giant mountain ranges and the desert wastes, it has its own climate unaffected by cosmic changes. Except a tidal wave from Japan, nothing would seem to be able to affect or disturb it. The whole of Italy feels more or less the climatic variations of the rest of Europe. All our Atlantic coast, all our interior basin from Texas to Manitoba, is in ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner

... come nightly to the sky; The tidal wave unto the sea; Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high, Can keep my own ...
— Thoughts I Met on the Highway • Ralph Waldo Trine

... is improbable but by no means impossible. We have only to look at our own troubles with the Japanese to get an intimate glimpse of what might lurk in a yellow tidal wave. The yellow man humbled Russia in the Russo-Japanese War and he smashed the Germans at Kiao Chow in the Great War. The fact that he was permitted to fight shoulder to shoulder with the white man has only added to his cockiness as we ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson

... grave stateliness. The crowd was only waiting for a spark of encouragement to shout itself hoarse in enthusiastic huzzahs. Eyes shone with suppressed excitement, and strong hearts swelled with pride in the towering man whose fame had surged like a tidal wave over the land. Yet with insolent deliberation he mounted the step and seated himself in the waiting carriage, giving no sign of having even noticed the flattering demonstration made in his honor. The smiles, nods, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various

... them. The foot-soldiers used their bayonets, and for a few minutes there was a terrific struggle. But before any result could be reached, a mob of the enemy's infantry and cavalry rushed into the space between the road and the pike, carrying friends and enemies with it, as before the sweep of a tidal wave on a ...
— A Lieutenant at Eighteen • Oliver Optic

... mingling with the roar of voices, while the space rapidly lessens between the approaching squadrons. The commanders who were seen, a moment before, splendidly mounted, dashing on at racing speed, turning in the saddle to look back at the tidal wave which they are leading, disappear in a cloud of sabres, clashing and cutting; but the fight is partly obscured by the rising dust and the mist from the over-heated animals. Riderless horses come, wounded and trembling, out of the melee; others appear, running in fright, carrying ...
— History of the Second Massachusetts Regiment of Infantry: Beverly Ford. • Daniel Oakey

... 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

... themselves, they came in sight of the entrance, and saw daylight beyond. A feeling of joy now came over the men, and three hearty cheers were given that echoed curiously through the arches overhead. Still there was another and serious obstacle to contend with. A boar, or tidal wave, had made at the entrance, and was rushing in with a roaring noise and such force that the boat could not have stemmed it for a minute. It was therefore, necessary to seek safety behind some high rocks on one side of the entrance, and wait a change in the tide. After waiting in this ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams

... in the woods," added Albert, wincing as the consequences of his rash act swept through his small form like some nauseous tidal wave. He shut his eyes. It upset him to see Keggs shimmering like that. A shimmering butler ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... Mammoths came thundering and trumpeting across the plateau, going through and over the lesser beasts like a tidal wave. Grom, having seen the last of his warriors pass down the beach paths, turned for one more glimpse of the monstrous and incredible scene. He had a swift vision of the squatting form of Ook-ootsk thrusting upward with reddened ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts

... Blaine, "that the desire to see and hear him was universal, and secured to him the majesty of numbers at every meeting."[1405] Greeley's friends interpreted these vast audiences as indications of a great tidal wave which would sweep Grant and his party from power. In the latter part of September they confidently counted upon carrying the October States. The South's endorsement of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, its declaration that the public credit must be sacredly ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander

... of the 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 ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke

... 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 shackles from ...
— The Daughter of a Republican • Bernie Babcock

... can make would show the members of a system like ours, attending on even the nearest of all the stars. The astrologer had a similar argument for his belief. The moon, as she circles around the earth, exerts a manifest influence upon terrestrial matter—the tidal wave rising and sinking synchronously with the movements of the moon, and other consequences depending directly or indirectly upon her revolution around the earth. The sun's influence is still more manifest; and, though it may have required ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor

... the bay being funnel-shaped, the tides rise to an extraordinary height. Twice a month, at the full and the change of the moon, the attractions of sun and moon combine, and the water rushes in with a roar like that of a tidal wave. The bore of Hangchow is not surpassed by that of the Hooghly or of the Bay of Fundy. Vessels are wrecked by it; and even the monsters of the deep are unable to contend with the fury of its ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin

... the joke of the ship—he must have weighed three hundred pounds. He could only pass through a door sideways, and the "Binghis" (natives of New Guinea), when they saw him, blamed him for a recent tidal wave, saying that he had fallen overboard. He was the most active man I have ever known, and on rough days would board the schooner by catching the dinghee boom with one hand as it dipped toward the launch, ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett

... a river, each pool a little sea, The tidal wave comes rushing on, men know not where to flee, But on he rides, still shouting, as angels did of old, "Flee! Flee ye to the mountain! Flee! forsake your homes ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant

... 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 as Death's ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver

... which swept over the Republic during the first week of November, 1909, and caused much damage, especially in the Cibao. A sudden storm in the afternoon of August 29, 1916, accompanied by a kind of tidal wave, surprised the American 14,500 ton armored cruiser "Memphis" at anchor in the roadstead of Santo Domingo City and wrecked it ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich

... 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

... ago the gray-green 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

... 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

... 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 ignorance ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson

... the lead had narrowed somewhat, raftering the young ice. Then, under the impulse of the tidal wave, it had opened wider than ever, leaving, in spite of the constantly forming ice, a broad band of black water before us. I sent MacMillan back with three dog teams and three Eskimos to bring up the load which Kyutah had thrown off before he went back to the land with Marvin, and also ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary

... brief moments of silent crisis. 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 by that silent ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie

... the tidal wave rose Arizona, as fleecy clouds float in the rays of Apollo's sun-torch when at eventide his flaming chariot plunges into unfathomed depths of ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann

... 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 ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach

... Phalaris bull and relegate him to its belly. Countless columns have been written, printed, possibly read, anent the Bradley-Martin ball—all the preachers and teachers, editors and other able idiots pouring forth voluminous opinions. A tidal wave of printer's ink has swept across the continent, churned to atrous foam by hurricanes of lawless gibberish and wild gusts of resounding gab. The empyrean has been ripped and the tympana of the too patient gods ravished with fulsome commendation and foolish curse, showers of Parthian ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... had a temple. A tidal wave following an earthquake swept walls and roof away, but left the mighty Amida unmoved, still ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn

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

... mountain masses and these boundless plains do you appreciate the forces that have caused it. The Krakatoa outbreak raised the water in our Thames four inches. A great Peruvian earthquake sent a tidal wave into ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson

... a peculiar habitat, inasmuch as it is more or less dominated by the sea. It is exposed to inundation by tidal wave and to occupation by immigrant fleets. It may be the base for out-going maritime enterprise or the goal of some oversea movement, the dispenser or the recipient of colonists. The contrast between coast-dwellers and the nearby inland people which ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple

... country is with you. The women are with 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 prisoner ...
— Augustus Does His Bit • George Bernard Shaw

... localities that nestle on its slopes, but human heedlessness proves incurable. If the Sicilians, knowing the nature of the soil, had built their towns of isolated, one-storied, wooden structures, at a reasonable distance from the shore, the effects of earthquake and tidal wave would not have been one hundredth part as terrible; yet Messina is being re-built on its former site, and apparently in the old style of architecture—a proceeding which simply invites a repetition of the same ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... disintegrated-looking tree soaring gaily up into the air in the midst of a huge column of dust and smoke. The next moment a rain of falling fragments of earth and wood came splashing down into the water—a few stray pieces actually reaching the Betty, which rocked vigorously as a minature tidal wave swept after us ...
— A Rogue by Compulsion • Victor Bridges

... plan was 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

... Bereft, broken and betrayed, a little mad thing, she pushed her way into their shadow and threw herself face downward, a small, writhing, rose-coloured heap, upon the damp mould. She could not have explained what she was doing or why she had given up all, as if some tidal wave had overwhelmed her. Suddenly she knew that all her new world had gone—forever and ever. As it had come so it had gone. As she had not doubted the permanence of its joy, so she KNEW that the end had come. Only the ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... Were an author to turn the pages of Book Prices Current, he could hardly fail, as he there read the names of famous men of old, to breathe the prayer, 'May my books some day be found forming part of this great tidal wave of literature which is for ever breaking on Earth's human shores!' But the vanity of authors is endless, and their prayers are apt to be ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell

... of those Anglicans who admit the historical, critical, philosophical, and theological assumptions upon which the controversy is based and which are presumed as common ground, is so small and dwindling that, were they all gained to the Church, we should be still a "feeble folk" in the face of that tidal wave of unbelief whose gathering force bids fair to sweep everything before it. Also the lingering impression left from "Tractarian" days as to the intellectual pre-eminence of the Catholicizing party in the Anglican ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell

... to beat so wildly that it seemed as if she would suffocate. What violent emotion was this which was flooding her, sweeping away all landmarks, covering, as by one great inrolling tidal wave, all the familiar country of her heart? Whither was she being swept in the midst of this overwhelming roaring torrent? Out to sea? To some swift destruction? ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley

... authorities; and that Felsenburgh was to-day to begin his tour from capital to capital. He was expected in Turin by the end of the week. From every Catholic centre throughout the world had come in messages imploring guidance; it was said that apostasy was rising like a tidal wave, that persecution threatened everywhere, and that even bishops were ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson

... you can divide Newport into those who leave to sell their old family pictures, those who have to buy their old family pictures, and the lucky few who need neither buy nor sell, who are neither goin' down nor bobbing up, but who have kept their heads above the American tidal wave from the beginning and continue to do so. And I don't believe that there are any nicer people in ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister

... the wisdom of the old saw that you cannot keep a good man down, Michael J. became skipper of the Retriever. This berth he continued to occupy with pleasure and profit to all concerned, until a small financial tidal wave, which began with Matt Peasley's purchase, at a ridiculously low figure, of the Oriental Steamship Company's huge freighter, Narcissus, swept the cunning Matthew into the presidency of the Blue Star Navigation Company; whereupon Matt designed to take ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne

... that marvellous scene. The expectation of all the ages was more than realized. If it be true that on that day a tidal wave of immense volume swept around the world, and rose high up in all rivers and estuaries, this may be taken as an emblem of the much more abounding grace, which on that day rose high above the mighty obstacles of human sin, and is destined to lift the entire universe ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer

... knew that 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 and begged her to speak. She ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton

... 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 circles as ...
— The Easiest Way - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Eugene Walter

... 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, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... anything but a certain surprise, that he felt no impulse to pretend politely that he had not been caught staring. They scrutinized each other, gravely, serenely, intently, until a thunder of applause, like a tidal wave surging over the hall, seemed to engulf their gaze. Madame Okraska was once more emerging. Miss Scrotton, catching up her boa, her programme and her fan, scuttled back to her seat with an air of desperate gravity; Sir Alliston returned ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick

... 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

... 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

... watery ridge rushing violently up an estuary, due to a strong tidal wave travelling up a gradually narrowing channel. Bores are common in the estuary of the Ganges and other Asiatic rivers, in those of Brazil, and at the mouth ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... 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 ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson

... my head. Surely, I thought, if there were news about the court-martial it would be interesting enough to the Dalziel family for the man to mention it, if only because Tony was to be a witness in the case! But the affair might have been more remote from us all than a destructive tidal wave in China, judging by Mr. Dalziel's oblivion of it. He and Father talked about our luck in grabbing cabins at short notice on the Mauretania; his wife and Mrs. Main discussed getting seats for that night at D'Annunzio's great moving-picture play, which ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... which, in their fall, crushed his splendid conservatory. One of his brethren represents the old man as weeping over the ruin of the collections of twenty years. Again the Hoogli, lashed into fury and swollen by the tidal wave, swept away the lately-formed road, and, cutting off another fourth of the original settlement of the Mission, imperilled the old house of Mr. Ward. Its ruins were levelled to form another road, and ever since the whole face of the right bank of the river has been ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith

... 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 of it to them and sell it back to them; and ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White

... in one of those trenches, a gallant colonel cheering a ragged handful of half-starved men in gray, unmindful of the order of retreat until engulfed by the grand army that swept over them like a tidal wave. ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon

... conscience, and one knows not what beside, we have the one all-powerful appeal, 'If ye love Me, keep My commandments,' and that draws all the agitations and fluctuations of the soul after it, as the rounded fulness of the moon does the heaped waters in the tidal wave that girdles the world. In Him we have all the helps that weakness needs, for He Himself will come and dwell with us and in us, and be ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... with these noble exceptions, awake to their great opportunity until it had passed by. Other bodies of learned men there were which equally failed to discern the irresistible force and divine sanction of the tidal wave of humane enthusiasm that was sweeping over the earth, and to see that it was destined to leave behind it a transformed and regenerated world. But the failure of these others, however lamentable, to discern the ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy

... and the latter now stood in one of the deep bow-windows engrossed with his own thoughts. Suspicion had been partially diverted from himself, but only partially, as he well knew, to return like a tidal wave, deepened and intensified by personal animosity, whenever the facts he had thus far so carefully concealed should become known. He gave little thought to this, however, except as it influenced him in planning his course of action for ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour

... the Gulf of Mexico, by Lakes Borgne, Pontchartrain, and Maauepas. I am more than one hundred miles from the Gulf itself—that is, following the direction of the river—but these great inland seas deeply penetrate the delta of the Mississippi, and through them the tidal wave approaches within a few miles of New Orleans, and still farther to the north. Sea-water might be reached through the swamps at a short distance ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid

... 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 ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell

... 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, private resurrection. ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie

... 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 ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore

... 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 death or life of the ...
— The Crucifixion of Philip Strong • Charles M. Sheldon

... 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 Valley. These Mohmands had neither been irritated nor interfered ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill

... gaiety on the eve of events which are to change the world! The flower grows where in an hour the volcano will burst forth; the bird sings in the tree which the earthquake will presently uproot; the pearly shell gleams where will pass the tidal wave—" He looked around the room. "Beauty, zeal, love, devotion—and to-morrow the smoke will roll, the cannon thunder, and the brute emerge all the same—just as he always does—just as he always does—stamping the flower into the mire, wringing the bird's neck, crushing ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston

... saved only that, of all the camp, by a fight that sent three men to the hospital, on a day when the wind shifted into the northwest and sent a sheet of flame rolling through the timber and down on Cougar Bay like a tidal wave. So Barlow told her. He cupped his hands now and called to his fellows on ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... there came a powerful change; one sollum Sunday night Occurred the tidal wave that put ol' Salty out o' sight. He win on deuce an' ace an' Jack—he win on king an' queen— Clif Bell allowed the like uv how he win wuz never seen. An' how he done it wuz revealed to all us fellers when He said he teched a humpback ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field

... tide 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 ...
— Scientific American, Vol. 17, No. 26 December 28, 1867 • Various

... exploded. The house went into flying fragments, and Nalasu flew into fragments with it. Jerry, in the doorway, caught in the out-draught of the explosion, was flung a score of feet away. All in the same fraction of an instant, earthquake, tidal wave, volcanic eruption, the thunder of the heavens and the fire-flashing of an electric bolt from the sky smote him and smote ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London

... 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 ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone

... 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 does ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke

... its vigor wanes, its functions languish, and, finally, the light of earthly life goes out. Although the single organization decays and passes away, nevertheless the species is uninterruptedly continued; the tidal wave of life surges higher on the shores of time, for reproduction is as constant and stable as the attractive forces of ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce

... harmonizes with what may be learned by 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 their points ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford

... outstanding fact was the manner in which the sense of peril to the fatherland rallied to its defense the different races, creeds, classes, and parties, the great tidal wave of genuine and sincere patriotism sweeping everything before it, even the mighty, passionate revolutionary agitation. It can hardly be questioned or doubted that if the war had been bitterly resented by the masses it would have precipitated ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo

... stood on the roof among the bubbly domes for a long time, looking over the umber-coloured town and the flowing oasis which swept to Bou-Saada's brown feet like a tidal wave. It was not yet time to go and ask questions of ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... of the Eden Gardens. 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 ...
— Recollections of Calcutta for over Half a Century • Montague Massey

... depths of the sea where its oxygen brings life. Their utmost pressure—it has been calculated— can build to 3,000 kilograms on every square foot of surface they strike. It was such waves in the Hebrides that repositioned a stone block weighing 84,000 pounds. It was their relatives in the tidal wave on December 23, 1854, that toppled part of the Japanese city of Tokyo, then went that same day at 700 kilometers per hour to break ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne



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



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