Crossword-Solution: ENGIRDED 8 letters, 2 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 11

Around us in a fearful storm The fiery hail fell thick and fast; And we engirded by the sand, Could not return the dreadful blast.

The young miss goes out in a cold night, with bare arms and head and neck, and wafer-like slippers on her feet, with her waist engirded in cords and whalebones, and her load of burdensome skirts, and dances in high glee two thirds of the night; then, with a vail on her head and her under-garments not yet dry from the recent perspiration, she goes to her cold chamber and bed, to get a troubled sleep, and awaken in a fever which carries her to her grave.

The immense mass of lofty and majestic buildings, exhibiting their roofs in widening circles around him, and stretching far away, like the broken billows of an ocean, created thoughts of tumult, discord, and perplexity, when contrasted with the serene beauty of the calm pastoral district which he had left; and, amid the nightly crowd of population which engirded him, a sense of his own individual insignificance fell, with a crushing weight, on his spirit.

That our French heads ached sorely for it:--thence, Marching through Picardy, to Calais here, They have engirded us; fix'd the dull tourniquet Of war upon our town; constraining, thus, The life blood of our commerce, with fair France, Of whom we are a limb; and all this openly:-- And, therefore, as an open foe, who think And strike in the same breath, I do esteem Their valour, and their plainness.