Nile Monitors

Famous quotes containing the words nile and/or monitors:

    Hard by the lilied Nile I saw
    A duskish river dragon stretched along.
    The brown habergeon of his limbs enamelled
    With sanguine alamandines and rainy pearl:
    And on his back there lay a young one sleeping,
    No bigger than a mouse;
    Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803–1849)

    To anybody who can hold the Present at its worth without being inappreciative of the Past, it may be forgiven, if to such an one the solitary old hulk at Portsmouth, Nelson’s Victory, seems to float there, not alone as the decaying monument of a fame incorruptible, but also as a poetic approach, softened by its picturesqueness, to the Monitors and yet mightier hulls of the European ironclads.
    Herman Melville (1819–1891)