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Swathe   Listen
verb
Swathe  v. t.  (past & past part. swathed; pres. part. swathing)  To bind with a swathe, band, bandage, or rollers. "Their children are never swathed or bound about with any thing when they are first born."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Swathe" Quotes from Famous Books



... time had uttered no complaint, though I saw the blood flowing down his side. The boatswain and Green had, with my help, bound up their wounds. I wanted Tom to let me assist him. "No," he said; "it's of no use. If you were to swathe me up, I could not pull. It will be time enough for that when we get round the headland." He was evidently getting weaker, and at last the boatswain persuaded him to lay in his oar, and try to stop the ...
— Tales of the Sea - And of our Jack Tars • W.H.G. Kingston

... thin veil, woven of light and shadow, lay on the lower hill, but the distant snows basked in the sky; and the sky, like a caressing mother, bending over them its immeasurable bosom, fed them with the milk of the clouds, carefully enfolding them with its swathe of mist, and refreshing them with its gently-breathing wind. Oh, with what a flight would my soul soar there, where a holy cold has stretched itself like a boundary between the earthly and the heavenly! My heart ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various

... boat has a capacity of gathering oysters from good ground at the rate of five thousand bushels per hour. The use of the submarine will make the collection of oysters more nearly like the method of reaping a field of grain, where one "swathe" systematically joins on to another, and the whole field is ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot

... freslige—seven-syllable lines in a quatrain, rhyming abab: a being trisyllabic, b dissyllabic rhymes. The stanza is obscure and probably corrupt; so far as it can be rendered at all, the literal translation is: "He healed the steed of Oengus / when he was in a swathe, in a cradle // there was given ... / from God ...
— The Latin & Irish Lives of Ciaran - Translations Of Christian Literature. Series V. Lives Of - The Celtic Saints • Anonymous

... upon the Brigade. This and a severe outbreak of Spanish 'flue provided him with a regular hundred patients a day. He himself had bitter personal experience of the boils. We never saw him without one for ten weeks. His own method of dealing with their excruciating tenderness was to swathe his face in cotton-wool and sticking-plaster. "Damn me, doctor, if you don't look like a loose imitation of Von Tirpitz," burst out the adjutant one day, when the doctor, with a large boil on either side of his chin, appeared ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)

... of our forefathers. And see the ignoble and feeble method we have put in its place. We cowardly promote our inefficient persons to the House of Lords, or similar obscure heights. We shelve them, or swathe them, or drop them. Sometimes, indeed, we apply a simulacrum of the ancient method of punishment, especially if the offence is sexual, but even there we have forgotten the correct method of its application, for in such cases the delinquent is usually an effective rather than ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis

... they'd have me swathe the clamorous tartan In lieu of trousers round my waist, Then they evoke the spirit of the Spartan Inherent in my simple taste; Inexorably I decline To drape the kilt on any ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 14, 1920 • Various

... of use, I know it—no skill, but steady nerves," although he had reckoned a leetle without his host here,—"And I can swathe a bandage too, although no surgeon," ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott

... has fall'n, has fall'n. She came, The woman with her ash, and lo the wound! But we will make a bandage for the limb, And swathe it, heel to knee, with splints and wool, And embrocations for the ...
— Rhymes of the East and Re-collected Verses • John Kendall (AKA Dum-Dum)

... a yard in breadth, chafing the belly before it is swathed, with oil of St. John's wort; after that raise up the matrix with a linen cloth, many times folded: then with a linen pillar or quilt, cover the flanks, and place the swathe somewhat above the haunches, winding it pretty stiff, applying at the same time a linen cloth to her nipples; do not immediately use the remedies to keep back the milk, by reason the body, at such a time, is out of frame; for there is neither vein nor artery which does not strongly beat; and remedies ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous

... wholly a foot in width, added to their already too high privileges by the dam proprietors. The hundred yoke of oxen, meanwhile, standing patient, gazing wishfully meadowward, at that inaccessible waving native grass, uncut but by the great mower Time, who cuts so broad a swathe, without so much as a wisp ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau

... these tenement quarters know by the mortality statistics how broad is the swathe that death cuts among their victims; but they add dollar to dollar as coffin after coffin is carried into ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune

... take a Russian village, when all its inhabitants mow a field belonging to the commune, or farmed by it. There you will see what man can produce when he works in common for communal production. Comrades vie with one another in cutting the widest swathe, women bestir themselves in their wake so as not to be distanced by the mowers. It is a festival of labour, in which a hundred people accomplish in a few hours a work that would not have been finished in a few days had they worked separately. What a miserable contrast compared to them is offered ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin

... will they swathe with linen mantles o'er, And lay unmouldering in their marble bed; Then gift of Arab or Panchaian shore, Assyrian balm and ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus

... over to him and saw the wide swathe cut through the forest and curving out of sight. "What ...
— A World Called Crimson • Darius John Granger

... thou be great, after being of none account, and hast gotten riches after squalor, being foremost in these in the city, and hast knowledge concerning useful matters, so that promotion is come unto thee; then swathe not thine heart in thine hoard, for thou art become the steward of the endowments of the God. Thou art not the last; another shall be thine equal, and to him shall come the ...
— The Instruction of Ptah-Hotep and the Instruction of Ke'Gemni - The Oldest Books in the World • Battiscombe G. Gunn

... always an interesting figure. His volubility of talk bordered on the miraculous; and whenever he began to swathe the Senate in his interminable rhetoric it awakened the laughter or the despair of everybody on the floor or in the galleries. Bayard and Thurman were recognized as the strong men on their side of the Senate in the Forty-first Congress. Buckalew was one of the really sterling men of his party, ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian

... laughed and looked about. On one hand there was a mown swathe of thistles, on the other they still grew luxuriantly all down ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett

... short his observations, he knew at last the cause of Neptune's brightness, knew that it was now a white-hot flaming sun that sped with increased rapidity away from the solar system. Somehow, the terrible swathe of fire that flowed from the dark star to Neptune had wrenched it out of its orbit and made ...
— Raiders of the Universes • Donald Wandrei

... they might perforce be healed. Cup after cup of cold water was given to the little ones, even to those who might bring water for themselves. They cared for the wounded wayfarer long after his wounds were made whole. It was their joy to bathe his limbs in oil and wine, or to swathe them in fragrant bands. And the wayfarer ceased to bear his own tent or to seek his own raiment. What others would do for him, he need not do for himself. And those who did not help themselves lost the power of self-help. And those who had helped ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan

... fame, duty calls, Trumpet-tongued from the walls Girding great Rome; Battle for truth and faith, Battle lest hostile scathe Crush us, or fetters swathe Free hearth and home! ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume VI - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... bolotnaia, which grows in the marshes, and resembles cyperoides, is gathered in the autumn, and carded like wool, with a comb made of the bones of the sea-swallow; with this, in lieu of linen and woollen clothes, they swathe their new-born infants, and use it for a covering next the skin whilst they are young. It is also made into a kind of wadding, and used for the purpose of giving additional warmth to ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr

... moistening afresh at this recurrence to her departure, and made no answer. He slashed along vigorously for two or three yards, cutting a wide swathe with his umbrella, and then his grievance appeared somewhat appeased, and he ...
— A Woman's Will • Anne Warner

... we decided to try a plan that was really no plan at all; that is to say, to seek more or less at random, till we consumed all our stores except just enough to take us home. Meanwhile, we would, each of us, every day, cut a sort of radiating swathe, working single-handed, from the cove entrance. Thus we would prospect as much of the country as possible in a sort of fan, both of us keeping our eyes open for a compass carved on a rock. In this way we might ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne

... strange surroundings. Then he sat up in bed, blinking his eyes open wider. The room was a large one with two beds in it. He and Kent had slept in one, and Old Tilly in the other. It was just before sunrise, and in the east a wide swathe of pink was banding the sky. Outside the window, a crowd of little birds were ...
— Three Young Knights • Annie Hamilton Donnell

... again for judgment before her "blank pure soul, alike the source and tomb of that prismatic glow." To this yellow he has subjected himself utterly: she had ordained it! He was to "bathe, to burnish himself, soul and body, to swim and swathe in yellow licence." And here he is: "absurd and frightful," "suffused with crocus, saffron, orange"—just as he ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne

... moment from burdened hearts, of the tears that run down so many blanched and anxious cheeks. Think of 'all the misery that is done under the sun!' If it could be made visible, what a dark pall would swathe the world, an atmosphere of sorrow rolling ever with it through space. The sight is too sad to be seen by any but by Him who cures it all, and it wrung from His heart the sigh with which ere He cured one poor sufferer—a drop in the ocean—He looked up to heaven, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren

... his pace; He showed the sign, he named the place, And, pressing forward like the wind, Left clamor and surprise behind. The fisherman forsook the strand, 330 The swarthy smith took dirk and brand; With changed cheer, the mower blithe Left in the half-cut swathe the scythe; The herds without a keeper strayed, The plow was in mid-furrow stayed, 335 The falc'ner tossed his hawk away, The hunter left the stag at bay; Prompt at the signal of alarms, Each son of Alpine rushed to arms; So swept the ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott

... the southern mothers, and the laughing cry of the clansmen as the foemen stood to arms, the wild devilish lilt of it for glory or a laughing death, and all around a black, black land, lighted alone with blazing farms, and the broad red swathe where the hillmen trailed. Came the very struggle, the gasping for breath, the cry of the fallen, the hand-to-hand grip, and then the great blare of triumph, and the Red ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars

... you? Then I must have overlooked it. Iss, iss, the French be landed at Talland Cove, and murderin' as they come! And the Troy lads be cut down like a swathe o' grass; and I, only I, escaped to carry the news. And you call this a Millenyum, I suppose?" he wound up with sudden ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... many had been engaged, had taken possession of the offices, &c., and were bringing the Hut once more into a habitable condition. Soon, too, a report was brought that the mowers, who had been brought in anticipation of their services being wanted, had cut a broad swathe to the ruins of the chapel, and the ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper

... for they saw, as it were, three blades aloft at once, and the silver-hafted sword bit deep, the gift of Phaeacian Euryalus long ago. The Guards also smote and thrust; it was for their lives they fought, and back rolled the tide of foes, leaving a swathe of dead. So a second time they came on, and a ...
— The World's Desire • H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang

... made the swathe better there than anywhere else," they reply. "Witless now is Njal," says Hallgerda, "though he knows how to give ...
— Njal's Saga • Unknown Icelanders

... terrible procession on its way to the rear. Men with arms in slings; men with trousers torn away at the knee, and bandaged legs; men with brow, face, mouth, or throat swathed; men with no shirts, but a broad swathe around the chest or stomach—each bandage grotesquely pictured with human figures printed to show how the wound should be bound, on whatever part of the body the bullet entered. Men staggering along unaided, or between two comrades, or ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.

... echoes that seemed as though they had slumbered since my departure, and now started from their sleep to greet or to admonish the returning truant. Grass in luxuriant tufts, capriciously disposed, grew about in large patches. The breeze passed heavily by, rustling the dark swathe, and murmuring fitfully as it departed. Desolation seemed to have marked the spot for her own—the grim abode of solitude and despair. During twenty years' sojourn in a strange land memory had still, with untiring delight, ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby

... a long, low swathe of ruby red, or garnet red—such as one sees in a glass of heavy burgundy when held to the light. There was such depth to this red! And, below it, separated from the main colour-mass by a line of gray-white fog, or line of sea, was another and smaller streak ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London

... and early fruits Deck undertakers out, and inky mutes; When young mammas, and fathers to a man, With terrors for their sons and heirs are wan; When stifling anteroom, or court, distils Fevers wholesale, and breaks the seals of wills. Should winter swathe the Alban fields in snow, Down to the sea your poet means to go, To nurse his ailments, and, in cosy nooks Close huddled up, to loiter o'er his books. But once let zephyrs blow, sweet friend, and then, If then you'll have him, he will quit ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin

... from house to house, asking for gifts of food such as eggs, cream, sausages, and cakes. Lastly, they sprinkle the Leaf Man with water and feast on the food they have collected. In the Fricktal, Switzerland, at Whitsuntide boys go out into a wood and swathe one of their number in leafy boughs. He is called the Whitsuntide-lout, and being mounted on horseback with a green branch in his hand he is led back into the village. At the village-well a halt is called and the leaf-clad lout is dismounted and ducked ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... variety. Buttercups occupy a whole patch—a little garden to themselves. What would the haymakers say to such a sight? Little, too, does the mower reck of the number, variety, and beauty of the grasses in a single armful of swathe, such as he gathers up to cover his jar of ale with and keep it cool by the hedge. The bennets, the flower of the grass, on their tall stalks, go down in numbers as countless as the sand of the seashore before ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies

... I was coming at. The evil in its broadest expanse is there. We look calmly on the external objects of the system without solving its internal grievances,—we build a right upon the ruins of ancient wrongs, and we swathe our thoughts with inconsistency that we may make the curse of a system invulnerable. It is not that we cannot do good under a bad system, but that we cannot ameliorate it, lest we weaken the foundation. And yet all this ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams

... thee thy dripping brother, Dank his weeds around him cling; Fogs his footsteps swathe and smother,— After thee thy dripping brother. Hearth-set couples hush each other, Listening ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson

... short, and it came from generators that were perhaps not equaled in space; no ordinary ship's defensive web could resist its vicious thrust. From the streak of silver that represented the Hawk's swoop, a stream of orange cut a swathe through the air ahead, holding accurately on the brigand ship. For just a tick of time there was a turmoil of color as offensive ray met defensive web; then the air cleared again—and ...
— Hawk Carse • Anthony Gilmore

... ma' an'cient fra'ter nize grass a slant' la'va com man dant' slant pa pa' saun'ter ti a'ra gape a las' pal'frey al ter'nate gaunt al'mond rap'ine af fla'tus far scath'less dra'ma hi a'tus swathe pag'eant la'ma ba na'na lance stal'wart da'ta sul ta'na calm aft'er ma'gi man da'mus laugh ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey

... best thou shouldst never hear it. Sin to thee greater than all treachery had been. Forgive, forgive! I go,—in meeting, leave thee; but be glad for me,—whether I sleep or whether I wake, know that a great curse will have fallen from me. Swathe my memory in thy love. Kiss me again, child! Rock me a little; stoop lower, and croon those old mountain-songs that once you sang when the sunshine soaked the sward and your hair was crowned ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various

... On the Lithuanian coast of the Baltic substantially the same tale is told with more humour. There a farmer's boy sleeping in the living-room of the house is awakened by the proceedings of two laumes, or elves. They stealthily fetch out of the bedroom the new-born babe and swathe it in swaddling clothes of their own, while they wrap in its clothes the oven-broom. Then they began to quarrel which of them should carry the broom thus rolled up into the bedroom; and as they were unable to agree they resolved to carry it together. No sooner had they disappeared into the inner ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland

... You,—pacing in even that paddock Of language allotted you ad hoc, With a clog at your fetlocks,—you—scorners Of me free from all its four corners? Was it 'clearness of words which convey thought?' Ay, if words never needed enswathe aught But ignorance, impudence, envy And malice—what word-swathe would then vie With yours for a clearness crystalline? But had you to put in one small line Some thought big and bouncing—as noddle Of goose, born to cackle and waddle And bite at man's heel as goose-wont is, ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson

... mistaken, stamps every lineament of that well-known countenance. It is death's colour on the cheek; death's cold stiffness in the limbs; and no hand but his could so close those eyes and make rigid those lips. There is no swoon here! Swathe him then in the garments of the grave; make ready for the funeral; let him be buried for ever out of sight; follow him to the ancestral tomb, and let the other household dead be remembered, and the other sad processions ...
— Parish Papers • Norman Macleod

... softly, "where are you, Stair?" A full swathe of broom moved itself aside, and she could see Stair Garland lying in a rocky niche which he had prepared long before, in case of such a very probable emergency as the officers of the excise ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett

... demesne-land of a king, where hinds were reaping with sharp sickles in their hands. Some armfuls along the swathe were falling in rows to the earth, whilst others the sheaf-binders were binding in twisted bands of straw. Three sheaf-binders stood over them, while behind boys gathering corn and bearing it in their arms gave it constantly to the binders; and among them the king in silence was standing ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)

... coat, and cut so low across the brow that the large green glasses which covered his eyes looked as if they were hung from it. A fierce beak of a nose, very long and very thin, cut the air in front of him. His ague had caused him to swathe his throat and chin with a broad linen cravat, and he wore a loose damask powdering-gown secured by a cord round the waist. As he advanced he carried his masterful nose high in the air, but his head turned slowly from side to side in the helpless manner of the ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle

... prevailing winds represent the home of the hour and all that the word signifies and embodies. Many a one was laid to rest beneath its spreading branches, for it was the custom of the pre-white folk's days to swathe the dead in frail strips of bark, knees to chin, and place the stiffened corpse in a shallow pit in the humpy which had been in most recent occupation. If the dead during life had possessed exceptional qualities, ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield

... lest he should get through the hedge, or climb over the high padlocked gate in some way or other, for the Long Pond was on the other side, though it could not be seen for trees. Nor was he to approach nearer to the mowers than one swathe; he was always to keep one swathe between him and the scythes, which are extremely ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies

... in the swathe of the uppermost ether, Where stars are the columns upholding a dome, And the edifice rolls on a corner of ocean, Lifts on a wave, poises on ...
— Spectra - A Book of Poetic Experiments • Arthur Ficke

... brave young fellow, pommy word. There comes the carriage, now raise her gently," and Will lifted the slender form as easily as he would have carried a swathe ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine

... rode together in stately procession till they entered the palace, when the King taking the young man by the hand, led him into a domed room followed by his suite, and making him sit down on a throne of gold, seated himself beside him. Then he unbound the swathe from his lower face; and behold, the King was a young lady, like the splendid sun shining in the sheeny sky, perfect in beauty and loveliness, brilliancy and grace, arrogance[FN199] and all perfection. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... the parts had fitted into the pattern, the gay green grass growing out of the stacked barrels and carts, and the sullen, silent, waiting mitrailleuse which can spit death in a wide swathe as it revolves from side to side, like the full stroke of a scythe on nodding daisies. The bark of it is as alarming as its bite—an incredibly rapid rat-tat that makes men fall on their faces when they hear, like worshipers at the bell ...
— Golden Lads • Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason

... Contrivance, and agreed to do whatever they should require of me: They immediately began to swaddle me up in my Night-Gown with long Pieces of Linnen, which they folded about me till they had wrapt me in above an hundred Yards of Swathe: My Arms were pressed to my Sides, and my Legs closed together by so many Wrappers one over another, that I looked like an AEgyptian Mummy. As I stood bolt upright upon one End in this antique Figure, one of the Ladies burst out a laughing, And now, Pontignan, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... her wings and weave Her dusky robe about the day's bright form, Boldly the sun's fair countenance displacing, And swathe it with her shadow in broad day? So a green wreath of mist enrings the moon, Till envious clouds do quite encompass her. No wind! and yet the slender stem is stirred, With faint, slight motion as from inward tremor. Mine eyes are full of grief—who sees ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus

... not for more words, but sprang out of bed, and had her work-a-day raiment on in a twinkling, and stayed but to wash her in a pool of the brook, and then was amidst the tall grass with the swathe falling before her. As she worked she thought, and could scarce tell whether joy at her present deliverance, or terror of the witch-wife, were the greatest. Sore was her longing to go see her friend in the wood, but the haysel lasted more than a week, and when that was done, ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris

... a swathe through the bright air, sharp-beaked, irresistible, shouting to the wind to make way. A glare of dust and sunshine tosses together behind it, and settles down. The sky is quiet and high, and the morning ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell



Words linked to "Swathe" :   wrapping, swathing, swaddle, bind, bandage



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