C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Tempests

The southern wind
Doth play the trumpet to his purposes,
And, by his hollow whistling in the leaves,
Foretells a tempest and a blustering day.

Shakespeare.

The sky
Is overcast, and musters muttering thunder,
In clouds that seem approaching fast, and show
In forked flashes a commanding tempest.

Byron.

Suddeine they see from midst of all the maine
The surging waters like a mountaine rise,
And the great sea, puft up with proud disdaine,
To swell above the measure of his guise,
As threatning to devoure all that his powre despise.

Spenser.

From cloud to cloud the rending lightnings rage;
Till, in the furious elemental war
Dissolv’d, the whole precipitated mass
Unbroken floods and solid torrents pour.

Thomson.

I have seen tempests, when the scolding winds
Have riv’d the knotty oaks; and I have seen
The ambitious ocean swell, and rage, and foam,
To be exalted with the threat’ning clouds,
But never till to-night, never till now,
Did I go through tempest dropping fire.

Shakespeare.

An horrid stillness first invades the ear,
And in that silence we the tempest fear.

Dryden.

Who shall face
The blast that wakes the fury of the sea?
*****
The vast hulks
Are whirled like chaff upon the waves; the sails
Fly, rent like webs of gossamer; the masts
Are snapped asunder.

William Cullen Bryant.

Along the woods, along the moorish fens,
Sighs the sad genius of the coming storm;
And up among the loose disjointed cliffs,
And fractured mountains wild, the brawling brook
And cave, presageful, send a hollow moan,
Resounding long in listening fancy’s ear.

Thomson.

Meanwhile
The sun, in his setting, sent up the last smile
Of his power, to baffle the storm. And, behold!
O’er the mountains embattled, his armies, all gold,
Rose and rested: while far up the dim airy crags,
Its artillery silenced, its banners in rags,
The rear of the tempest its sullen retreat
Drew off slowly, receding in silence, to meet
The powers of the night, which, now gathering afar,
Had already sent forward one bright, single star.

Owen Meredith.

Look, from the turbid south
What floods of flame in red diffusion burst,
Frequent and furious, darted thro’ the dark
And broken ridges of a thousand clouds,
Pil’d hill on hill; and hark, the thunder rous’d,
Groans in long roarings through the distant gloom.

Mallet.

Blow, wind, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!
Crack nature’s moulds, all germens spill at once,
That make ungrateful man.

Shakespeare.

There is war in the skies!
Lo! the black-winged legions of tempest arise
O’er those sharp splinter’d rocks that are gleaming below
In the soft light, so fair and so fatal, as though
Some seraph burn’d through them, the thunderbolt searching
Which the black cloud unbosom’d just now.

Owen Meredith.

A boding silence reigns,
Dread through the dun expanse; save the dull sound
That from the mountain, previous to the storm,
Rolls o’er the muttering earth, disturbs the flood,
And shakes the forest leaf without a breath.
Prone, to the lowest vale, aerial tribes
Descend: the tempest-loving raven scarce
Dares wing the dubious dusk. In awful gaze
The cattle stand, and on the scowling heavens
Cast a deploring eye; by man forsook,
Who to the crowded cottage hies him fast,
Or seeks the shelter of the downward cave.

Thomson.

And sometimes too a burst of rain,
Swept from the black horizon, broad, descends
In one continuous flood. Still over head
The mingling tempest weaves its gloom, and still
The deluge deepens; till the fields around
Lie sunk, and flatted, in the sordid wave.
Sudden the ditches swell; the meadows swim.
Red, from the hills, innumerable streams
Tumultuous roar; and high above its banks
The river lift; before whose rushing tide,
Herds, flocks, and harvests, cottages, and swains,
Roll mingled down; all that the winds had spar’d
In one wild moment ruined; the big hopes
And well-earned treasures of the painful year.

Thomson.

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