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More "Blackness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... he waited, reading titles he found himself unable to lay hold of; and there, while he waited, the threatened rain began, and, ere he was admitted to the inner premises, such a black deluge came pouring down as, for blackness at least, comes down nowhere save in London. With this accompaniment, he was ushered at length into a dingy office, deep in the recesses of the house, where a young man whom he saw for the first time had evidently, while Hector waited ...
— Far Above Rubies • George MacDonald
... showed us a long, long, straight passage cut through the mountain, with an oval roof arched like an egg. Except for a few yards ahead, where the way was lit up and the arch of close-set stones glimmered grey, the blackness would have been unbroken had it not been for the tunnel-lights. They went on and on in a sparkling line as far as our eyes could reach; and if the most famous whale in the world had had a spine made of diamonds, Jonah would have got much the same effect that we did as he wandered about ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... lid, and inside were roses, magnificent, half-opened roses with the dew still on their leaves, the fat green stalks nearly a yard in length—dozens of roses of every colour and shade, from the lustrous whiteness of Frau Carl to the purple blackness of Prince Camille. Claire gathered them in her arms, unconscious of the charming picture which she made, in her simple blue lawn dress, with her glowing face rising over the riot of colour, gathered them in a great handful, and ran ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... filled with shipping that could not bear up against such a tornado. I stood among the anxious multitude, watching the symptoms of the rising storm. We looked intently at the heavens as they gathered blackness, and saw far off toward the horizon the clouds and the waves mingling together into one great vaporous mass. Now and then we were tantalized by brief intervals of bright skies; but they were again quickly ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson
... yet in the inky blackness of the room accurate hunting down was difficult. It was like a duel between blind men. Thor was moving uncertainly, pausing from second to second to fix the object ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... when the little boy that was I was running after the Dunlap girls that blackness came upon him. All memory there ceases, for Jesse Fancher there ceased, and, as Jesse Fancher, ceased for ever. The form that was Jesse Fancher, the body that was his, being matter and apparitional, like an apparition passed and was not. But ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... to look about. His view commanded a horizon of two or three miles, for he seemed to be near the center of the tableland. Its surface was broken by the hummocks and hollows of the peat, and tufts of white wild cotton relieved the blackness of the gashes in the soil. Sheep fed in the distance, and he heard the harsh cry of a grouse that skimmed the heath. The skyline was clear, and by and by two sharp but ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... always bear within ourselves the principle of what we shall be later on, we are always rising higher. Question us on our past, and, like the rocket, we reply that we are going forward, but that our path is illumined only in our immediate neighbourhood, and that the rest of the road is lost in the blackness of night; we no more know from where we came than we know our destination, but we do know that we came from below and are rising higher, and that is all that is necessary to interest us in ourselves and make us conscious of what we are. And who knows but what our ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... blurred picture of Captain Ross high up on the bridge, peering into the moving blackness. How strange that there should be hidden in the convolutions of a man's brain an intelligence that laid bare the pretences of that ravenous demon without. Each of the ship's officers, the commander more ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... to the faint gray light which comes just before dawn, and by it we could distinguish lumps of blackness which as we approached turned into the thatched huts of the villagers. Until we found the main trail into the town we kept close to the bamboo fences of these huts, and then, still keeping in the shadows, we followed the trail until it turned into ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... Virginia knew that these things were not dangerous—that daylight would show them to be only deer-mice, hares, weasels, bats, and owls—nevertheless, they had their effect. For about her was cloying velvet blackness—not the closed-in blackness of a room, where one feels the embrace of the four walls, but the blackness of infinite space through which sweep mysterious currents of air. After a long time she turned sharp to the left. After a long time more she perceived a faint, opalescent glimmer ...
— Conjuror's House - A Romance of the Free Forest • Stewart Edward White
... though they have lost their language, and call themselves Germans; but the word Zernevitz, near Dantzic, still attests that the Sclavic language was once common in those parts. Zernevitz means the thing of blackness, as Tzernebock means the god of blackness. Prussia itself merely means, in Sclavish, Lower Russia. There is scarcely a race or language in the world more extended than the Sclavic. On the other side of the Donau you will find the Sclaves ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... may do, whatever he may say, an' whatever he may swear," said the Scotchman to himself, "he is no' like ane of these. Try as he may, he canna descend so low into the blackness o' evil as these sons o' perdition. Although he has done evil beyond a poor mortal's computation, he walks like a king amang them. Even that Blackbeard, striving to be decent for an hour or two, knows a superior when ...
— Kate Bonnet - The Romance of a Pirate's Daughter • Frank R. Stockton
... stenciled outlines of the upper margins of their bathing suits. Ladies of the opposing school, upon the contrary, guard the whiteness of their skins as jealously as the men of the "Browning Club" guard their blackness. Rather than be touched with tan, many ladies of the latter group deny themselves the pleasures of the surf. The parasols beneath which they arrive upon the sands are not lowered until they are safely seated beneath the ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... in a flood. Stephen's mother could not see in the blackness the bitterness on his face. Above the roar of the waters ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... like aberration of mind, from the grim and horrid topic which he invited, to thoughts of wealth and power and triumph and exulting prophecies of the fame her son should achieve. He looked but on the blackness of the gulf, and shuddered; her vision overleaped it, and smiled on the misty palaces her ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... going down the bank, followed eagerly by the little Sanford, who had also his interest in the arrival of the parcels from London. There came after them presently a lithe young negro boy of fifteen, not yet two years out of Africa. He was clad in nothing but his native blackness, which was deemed sufficient for a half-grown negro in that day. Mrs. Browne had sent black Jocko after the others with orders to bring up her things "without waiting for the gentlemen to get ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston
... white chief carries an old head on young shoulders," at last he said approvingly. "He speaks truly when he says that the air is thick with danger. When the blackness of night comes, then will come, also, those who make war from behind the trees of the forest. In the darkness, how is the young white and his friends to tell enemies from friends? The jackals will ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... a year that she is gone, and the people whom she used to benefit care no more for her death than for Queen Anne's. We are all selfish: the world is selfish: there are but a few exceptions, like you, my dear, to shine like good deeds in a naughty world, and make the blackness more dismal." ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and hardy men, whose contact with life was primitive and had the genuineness and health of such occupations, was the kind of human companionship which he felt most naturally and pleasurably. But the wearing in of the facts upon him is seen in the way in which the blackness of coal and the whiteness of salt begin to color the page, until it would seem as if he handled and saw no other objects, and also in the comfort that the cold sea-wind, and freshening waves, and the horizon of cloud and ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... was so sombre. Smith's eyes had grown more accustomed to the blackness and he began to distinguish between the various shades of darkness. Once or twice he thought he saw to the side of them another figure, moving or halting as they halted, but when he looked fixedly he could distinguish nothing but the ...
— The Princess Pocahontas • Virginia Watson
... For through the blackness of that night the Irish Parliament always shone like a star. Ireland grew with its growth, and withered with its decay. Precisely as she had more Home Rule she advanced, and precisely as she had less she fell back. But as long as the Parliament existed ...
— Home Rule - Second Edition • Harold Spender
... a small key and entered, holding it back courteously for his three new companions to enter with him. They did so, and he closed the door. At the same moment the light was extinguished in the upper window, and the outside of the house became a mere wall of dense blackness in the ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... distractions among the English, and made an attempt to recover Boulogne and that territory which Henry VIII. had conquered from France, On other pretences, he assembled an army, and falling suddenly upon the Boulonnois, took the castles of Sellaque, Blackness, and Ambleteuse, though well supplied with garrisons, ammunition, and provisions.[*] He endeavored to surprise Boulenberg, and was repulsed; but the garrison, not thinking the place tenable after the loss of ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... the midst of the storm, into the alternating throbs of blackness and radiance; now the possessor of no more room than what my body filled, and now isolated in world-wide space. And the thunder seemed to follow me, bellowing after ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... not doubt, we had to make against some Government vessel that would follow us. But I found to my surprise that the men on the ship knew nothing of the dangerous position in which they were, and worked with a calm disregard to the blackness of the night, and to the hazard of the moment. Black I did not meet, for they put me into a cabin aft, of which I was the sole occupant; and, being ordered by the man John, who was half-drunk and very threatening, to get below, ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... would be buried and the world itself would be no more. He looked at the calendar which he had scratched upon the wall. It was the twenty-fourth day of December. He wondered whether God knew what was happening and whether He had planned it. Then he gave up wondering, for behind him, from the blackness of ...
— Christmas Outside of Eden • Coningsby Dawson
... light of any kind would be possible; so that if life were conveyed across space, from star to star, upon infinitesimal specks of dust, under the influence of light pressure, as postulated by Arrhenius (Worlds in the Making, pp. 212-30), this life must exist, and in a sense originate, in the blackness of inter-stellar space.[10] And, finally, if life on our globe originated, as many think, in the ocean's depths,[11] this must have been in the densest darkness, since light penetrates but a few fathoms below the surface of the ocean. Below that ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... A mighty gust of wind striking him in mid-air and almost hurling him into the blackness below had caused him to put down as a brace his wounded hind leg. Gasping, trembling, he lay down for a minute on the whitened ties, one leg hanging through. Then he rose and ...
— Frank of Freedom Hill • Samuel A. Derieux
... path. No trench is too deep for it, no dug-out, unless hermetically sealed, is safe from it. Night and darkness only heighten its effect. It is the only weapon that is as effective in a fog or in the inky blackness of a moonless night as in the most brilliant sunshine. Only the mask and the training that go with it protect. Terror, confusion, lack of ...
— by Victor LeFebure • J. Walker McSpadden
... sun, but by an opaque body, the offspring and satellite of the earth, coming between the earth and sun. And so, when Christian men lose the light of God's face, it is not because there is any 'variableness or shadow of turning' in Him, but because between Him and them has come the blackness—their own offspring—of their own sin. You are not safe if you are outside the light of His countenance. These ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... obscures, empoisons, and contaminates the animal spirits, it is proper afterwards that he should have a bath of pure and clean water, with abundance of whey; to purify, by the water, the feculency of the foul humour, and by the whey to clarify the blackness of the vapour. But, before all things, I think it desirable to enliven him by pleasant conversations, by vocal and instrumental music, to which it will not be amiss to add dancers, that their movements, figures, and agility ...
— Monsieur de Pourceaugnac • Moliere
... Miss Belvoir. This lady was sitting by the fire, holding a screen. She came forward and greeted them with great cordiality. She was a small, dark, amiable-looking woman about thirty. Her hair and eyes were of a blackness one rarely sees, her complexion was clear and bright, her figure extremely small and trim. Without being exactly pretty, she was very agreeable to the eye, and also had the attraction of looking remarkably different from other people. Indeed her costume was so ...
— Bird of Paradise • Ada Leverson
... the change having taken place in the night. His beard was filthy with drivel, and the Emperor, moved by his pitiful condition, pardoned him. There was a clergyman of Nottingham whose daughter at the age of thirteen experienced a change from jet-blackness of the hair to white in a single night, but this was confined to a spot on the back of the head 1 1/2 inches in length. Her hair soon became striped, and in seven years was totally white. The same ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... "Glittering laurels":—I must observe that the colour of green suffers almost a spiritual change and exaltation under the effect of Bengal lights.]; whilst all around ourselves, that formed a centre of light, the darkness gathered on the rear and flanks in massy blackness: these optical splendours, together with the prodigious enthusiasm of the people, composed a picture at once scenical and affecting, theatrical and holy. As we staid for three or four minutes, I alighted; and immediately from a dismantled ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... still kneeling, her hands at her breast, and her eyes, wide and dark, fixed upon the blackness without the open door. I went up to her and took ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... than this dread. I knew that in the struggle which was going on in my frame, I was borne fearfully near the dark gulf, and the thought that, at such a time, both reason and will were leaving my brain, filled me with an agony, the depth and blackness of which I should vainly attempt to portray. I threw myself on my bed, with the excited blood still roaring wildly in my ears, my heart throbbing with a force that seemed to be rapidly wearing away my life, ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... you loved me, why did you leave me? I do not comprehend. How could you let me stand in the darkness under your window and then turn away from it into the awful blackness and solitude to ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... her, that she was never happy except with a pencil in her hand. "Show the gentleman, my dear," and out came a book of studios of cubes, globes, posts, etc., while Mr. Mauleverer talked artistically of drawing from models. Next, he observed on a certain suspicious blackness of little Mary's eye, and asked her what she had done to herself. But the child hung her head, and Mrs. Rawlins answered for her, "Ah! Mary is ashamed to tell: but the gentleman will think nothing of it, my dear. He knows that ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... rising, tore the dry leaves from the trees. Kemp, exiled, as it were, from the Pavilion, sat in the big car and watched the gathering blackness. Finally he got out and put up the curtains. Everything would be ready when Dalton came. He knew better, however, than to warn his master. George was apt to be sharp when ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... excited. The night was close, and there were mutterings of thunder at times; the cloud whence they came seemed to her to spread its doleful blackness over this one roof. An impulse seized her; she took paper and sat down at her desk to write. It was a letter to Waymark, a letter such as she had never addressed to him, and which, even in writing it, she was conscious she could not send. Her hand trembled as she filled the pages ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... no choice but to obey, and their attention was soon occupied by the strange sights before them. As one odd figure after another sprang out of the dark into the firelight, capered and pranced, and then disappeared into the blackness again, Ann and Rudolf drew closer together and squeezed hands, very queer feelings creeping up and down their back-bones. The strangest part of it all was that among that crazy company were many whom the children did not see ...
— The Wonderful Bed • Gertrude Knevels
... perpendicular rain that scratched out the colours of the landscape. The sea was troubled, although no wind blew; it heaved as with an inward unrest. But suddenly there was a great broken sound somewhere in the air; and the next moment a storm came tearing over the face of the sea, covering it with blackness innumerably rent into spots of white. Presently it struck the shore, and a great rude blast came roaring through the grating, carrying with it a sheet of rain, and, catching Florimel's hair, sent it streaming wildly out ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... above the water, awoke answering gleams from its surface. Trembling stripes of light reached down from the shore they had just left; on the other side of the bridge the river lost itself in the blackness of open fields. Thunder rumbled in the distance; they looked over to where the red lights soared. A train with lighted windows rolled between iron arches that seemed to spring up out of the night for an instant, to sink back into darkness again. The thunder grew ...
— The Dead Are Silent - 1907 • Arthur Schnitzler
... not less important awaits her. She has seen the face of the KING, and as the rising sun reveals that which was hidden in the darkness, so His light has revealed her blackness to her. "Ah," she cries, "I am black";—"But comely," interjects the Bridegroom, with inimitable grace and tenderness. "Nay, 'black as the tents of Kedar,'" she continues. "Yet to Me," He responds, "thou art 'comely as the curtains of Solomon!'" Nothing humbles ...
— Union And Communion - or Thoughts on the Song of Solomon • J. Hudson Taylor
... that utter blackness which precedes the dawn, Kate and her father reached the mouth ...
— The Untamed • Max Brand
... possible friend or foe. The thudding of hoofs through the inferno of darkness stopped, as the rider below considered the latest move of the horseman above. They were so near that Judith could hear the labored breathing of the sweating horse. The blackness of the night had become a tangible thing. The towering mountains were one piece with the gaping precipice, the trail, the scrub pines, the gauntlet on her hand. The horse below resumed its stumbling gait. Judith crowded Dolly close ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... vaguely exhilarated by the not too abstruse music of the posturing fiddlers, his eyes caressed by the soft glow of the Japanese lanterns, strung like antique jewelled necklets against the almost tangible blackness of the night, he found himself listening with an half-malicious amusement to the commonplace of the conversational formulae affected by the young world of society, the well-worn, patched-up questions, the anticipated ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... less than a woman, that Xerxes's army drank up rivers, that cicades are bred out of cuckoo-spittle, that Hannibal split Alps with vinegar, together with many similar fallacies touching Pope Joan, the Wandering Jew, the decuman or tenth wave, the blackness of negroes, Friar Bacon's brazen head, etc. Another book in which great learning and ingenuity were applied to trifling ends, was the same author's Garden of Cyrus; or, the Quincuncial Lozenge or Network Plantations of the Ancients, in which ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... that my hour had come. At first I did not understand, for I was watching the Senora's face in the moonlight, and to me she looked like an angel. Then I saw, and my senses left me. It was as though hands were stretched up from the blackness to drag me down—yes, I saw the hands. But you saved me, Outram, though that will not help me, for I shall perish in some such way at last. So be it. It is best that I should die, who cannot conquer the evil of ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... Freydisa when we stood beneath the light of the friendly stars. "I know nothing; my mind is a blackness." ...
— The Wanderer's Necklace • H. Rider Haggard
... in the blackness, these slippery little savages of Titan, their half naked bodies crowding him and stifling him with their sweaty nearness. Again and again Carr struck out, but it was like fighting a horde of squirming ...
— Creatures of Vibration • Harl Vincent
... blur of sulphurous blackness. The bullets are as thick as if a swarm of leaden locusts had been routed from the foliage, and taken wing hillward. Then behind, through the gaps in the trees, big, whining, screeching swarms of another ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... attacked the Latin influence in Germany. On the advantages of this method I need not dwell: if you are annoyed at Jack Johnson knocking out an English prize-fighter, you have only to say that it was the whiteness of the black man that won and the blackness of the white man that was beaten. But about the Italian Renaissance they are less general and will go into detail. They will discover (in their researches into 'istry, as Mr. Gandish said) that Michael Angelo's surname was Buonarotti; and they will point out that the ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... slicing the blackness with an oval white finger, the farthest edge of which reached a hundred and fifty yards. Over the "western" lake—and its inky ripples sparkled somehow ominously. Over the jungle's confusion—and trees, great bushes, spiky vines and creeper-growths leaped into momentary ...
— The Passing of Ku Sui • Anthony Gilmore
... truths, filled the anxious, aching heart with monkish legends of unattested miracles, and in place of the pure worship of God, gives us mummeries nearer akin to pagan rites! I thank God that I am released from my thraldom. I see now the tissue of falsehood so plausible in which all things were wrapped. Blackness and deceit in the garb of truth and purity! And it is horrible, to think that he who so led me astray claims to be my brother! Mary, Mary, how can I tell Mr. Stewart this?—tell him that I have wandered from the true faith—that I have knelt ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... deep layer of the exhaustless soil, or flocks of prairie-chickens fly up from every little valley, images of life, joy, and plenty belong to the scene. The summer flowers are not more cheerful than the spring blaze, the spring blackness of richness, or the spring whirr and flutter. The sky is alive with the return of migratory birds, swinging back and forth, as if hesitating where to choose, where all is good. Frogs hold noisy jubilees, ("Anniversary ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... from premisses, or by way of causation as effect from cause; but, in either case, necessarily. Inseparable accidents, on the other hand, are attributes universal, so far as we know, to the species (e.g. blackness to crows), but not necessary; i.e. neither involved in the meaning of the name of the species, nor following from attributes which are. Separable accidents do not belong to all, or if to all, not at all times (e.g. the fact of being born, to man), and sometimes are not constant ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... right in the Skipper's eyes. They were sea-blue and blazing with eagerness and with the pitiful glare of madness. Over the clergyman's shoulder the pale painter with his keen eyes swept the bearded face of the Skipper with a rapid and greedy glance. By the time the match dwindled and the blackness closed in again the face was a possession of his memory. He saw it even though it was actually invisible; the rugged features dignified by madness, the clear, blue eyes full of a saddening fire, and—ere the match faded—of a horror of disappointment, the curling brown ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... upon the sward That night, instead of golden— And long the bride's maids wait the lord In the bridal-chamber olden; Ah, well! pale hands unwove the flowers That bound the milk-white forehead— The star has sunk, the red moon glowers Down slopes of blackness horrid. ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... came to the top of the low, rolling hill, and ahead in the darkness there gleamed a tiny, wizened light set in a blotch of blackness. Under the great white stars it burned a sickly red and seemed out ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... length. This means that as the planet circles round the sun he turns once. If this is so the sun will shine on one half of the planet, producing an accumulated heat terrific to think of; while the other side is plunged in blackness. The side which faces the sun must be heated to a pitch inconceivable to us during the nearer half of the orbit—a pitch at which every substance must be at boiling-point, and which no life as we know it could possibly endure. Seen from our point of view, Mercury goes through all the phases of the ...
— The Children's Book of Stars • G.E. Mitton
... be quite deserted. The light from South's window made rays on the fog, but did not reach the tree. A quarter of an hour passed, and all was blackness overhead. Giles had not ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... blackness had fallen. The waves came savagely, ill-defined masses let loose from a viewless limbo to work their harm. Sometimes they caught the dull gray flash of breaking waters, but more often everything was hidden. The roar of the ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... officer in the American Navy; my mother a Spaniard. She was very beautiful, I always heard; and her miniature, which my father's dying hand placed about my neck, proclaimed her so. A pale, clear, olive tint, eyes of thrilling blackness, long, lustrous hair, and a look of mingled tenderness and melancholy made it, in my thought, the loveliest face that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... and death. It was that which blackened the radiant morning, not the mercifully abrupt cessation of a worn-out life. For Peter death had two sharply differentiated aspects—one of release to the tired and old, for whom the grasshopper was a burden; the other of an unthinkable blackness of tragedy—sheer sharp loss that knew no compensation. It was not with this bitter face that death had stepped into their lives on this clear morning. One could imagine that weary figure glad to end his wayfaring so; one could even imagine those steps to death deliberately taken; and one did imagine ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... necessary, as the tide could not be high enough yet to permit its coming directly across to where we were. We watched its course anxiously. Finally it seemed to be heading toward us, but we were not certain. Then it disappeared altogether and there was nothing but blackness and silence where ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... goes Rangon, and Carroll and I got up, stretched ourselves, and took a walk. We walked a mile or so, until it began to get pretty dark, and then turned; and it was as we came into the blackness of one of these cypress hedges that the thing I'm telling you of happened. The hedge took a sharp turn at that point; as we came round the angle we saw a couple of women's figures hardly more than twenty yards ahead—don't know how they got ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... association drives me to say that white is exalted and pure, green is exuberant, red suggests love or shame or strength. Without the colour or its equivalent, life to me would be dark, barren, a vast blackness. ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... an instant. Even as the dome shattered under the copter's shell and Dark recognized the imminence of death, the groundcar twisted out of control and careened from the highway. He felt it spinning over and over, and then blackness closed ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... A blackness seemed to settle upon Helena—and how cold it was! She shivered. Her dark eyes, wide, tearless now, stared, startled, dazed, at the white face on the pillow crowned with its mass of golden hair. Her sweetness! Her nobleness! Helena's lips half parted and her breath ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... fire. Licking up the curl, the flame gradually leaped from one piece of wood to another until the entire handful was ablaze. The dancing light played upon the three faces and sent a glow out into the surrounding blackness. Harry deposited the burning shavings upon the floor, where the fire was soon transmitted to the larger piece of wood Jack had used ...
— Boy Scouts Mysterious Signal - or Perils of the Black Bear Patrol • G. Harvey Ralphson
... sharp cry of fear cut out like a whip-lash into the blackness. A woman's cry. There were sounds of angry struggle as Riviere made swiftly to the aid of that woman ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... Only in faint lines of light was the blackness of the sky broken, and as she looked out over the trees in the garden below, and down the street, asleep and still, the scene changed, and no longer was she in Yorkburg, but in the little village of Chenonceaux, at the Inn of Le Bon Laboureur. Her friend, Miss ...
— Miss Gibbie Gault • Kate Langley Bosher
... Its lonely points of light vanished early. Up here on the ridge there was wind and quiet. He peopled the gulf of blackness ahead with things sinister and evil in spirit like Adam Craig and turned his back upon it with a shiver. There would be peace in the voice ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... inquiries, but by resolutely prosecuting them. This, it appears to us, is a case of singular interest, and rarely exemplified, if at all elsewhere, in these our days. How has this man, to whom the world once offered nothing but blackness, denial and despair, attained to that better vision which now shows it to him, not tolerable only, but full of solemnity and loveliness? How has the belief of a Saint been united in this high and true mind with the clearness of a Sceptic; the devout spirit of a Fenelon ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... the journey through the valley of humiliation and suffering, when soul lived upon and thought only of self and its escape. Through ages of suffering and loneliness and blackness, my only thought was a constant prayer for absolute non-existence. Within the heart of my tiny soul there began to grow a germ-like conception and reverence for God. With this thought the soul seemed to take unto itself strength to make feeble efforts to tear a way through its coffin of flinty ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... straight at the blackness of the wall, when suddenly a light appeared in it. To his immense surprise, he found himself looking up a kind of long, arched tunnel, at whose farther end a man stood in a boat, a light in his hand. Only for an instant ...
— The Wolf Patrol - A Tale of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts • John Finnemore
... good; With colour and glory and story and song ye are fed as with food: The cold and the heat, The bitter and the sweet, The calm and the tempest fulfil my Word; Yet will ye complain of my two-edged sword That has fashioned the finite and mortal and given you the sweetness of strife, The blackness and whiteness, The darkness and brightness, Which sever your souls from the formless and void and hold ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... it from his packet He pressed the spring switch, and in an instant a brilliant shaft of radiance shot out, cutting the intense blackness like a knife. Mr. Damon flashed ...
— Tom Swift and his Sky Racer - or, The Quickest Flight on Record • Victor Appleton
... note-book, and stirs up the cooking-fire. The smell of broiling and frying and boiling arises in the air. By the dancing flame of the campfire you eat your third dinner for the day—in the mountains all meals are dinners, and formidable ones at that. The curtain of blackness draws down close. Through it shine stars, loom mountains cold and mist-like in the moon. You tell stories. You smoke pipes. After a time the pleasant chill creeps down from the eternal snows. Some one throws another handful of pine-cones on the fire. Sleepily you prepare for bed. The pine-cones ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... to every religion that ever deserved the name," put in Vance like a voice from a distance. Blackness came somehow with his interruption—a touch of darkness. He ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... Cutting through the blackness like a scimitar shone a ray of light from above, widening as it descended and ending in a white patch on the floor. It was moved to and fro. Then it disappeared. Another vague creaking sound followed—that ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... came from the north with sleet on its back. Raw shuddering gusts whipped the sea till the ship lurched and men felt driven spindrift stinging their faces. Beyond the rail there was winter night, a moving blackness where the waves rushed and clamored; straining into the great dark, men sensed only the bitter salt of sea-scud, the nettle of sleet and the lash ...
— The Valor of Cappen Varra • Poul William Anderson
... abridged, with every muscle and fiber seeming to sag like an ill-supported fence, Fran's thoughts were at the abysmal stage of discouragement. For a time, there seemed in her heart not the tiniest taper alight, and in this blackness, both hope and failure ...
— Fran • John Breckenridge Ellis
... different? Good intentions will never change it. Good desires will never change it. God only can make you ready for that hour. Unless you seek him, you too will take a "leap into the dark"; for you there will be only the "blackness of darkness forever." "If ye will hear his voice, harden not ...
— Heart Talks • Charles Wesley Naylor
... himself back again to the side of Francisco, and whispered a warning to him not to move if he valued his life. As Leonard spoke, he noticed that the blackness of the night was turning grey with the light of the unrisen moon. Already her rays, striking upwards, brightened the sky above and the mountains behind, and from them fell a pale reflection, which grew ...
— The People Of The Mist • H. Rider Haggard
... long time I sat there trying to pierce the blackness of the room beyond the window with my straining eyes, deeply sensitive to a curiosity that had as its basic force the very natural anxiety to know what disposition she had made of the rest of her person in order to ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... guide in eye, I took stock of the thing with idle fingers; in the blackness my finger-tips were all the eyes I had for so small a thing. It was about the size of a five-pound butter box, I should say; it seemed as it lay in my hand a sort of an old and polished casket, a thing done with an ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... night! To know that death was feasting in that blackness; to feel that vigilance was of no avail; to turn away convulsed from the iron push of the demoniac force which for the time seemed to have taken the place of an atmosphere. Smash! Rattle. Then a wild whistling; a many lashes, that flapped and cracked; ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... without attempting to press the matter; and a moment later the car glided away, its lamps gleaming in the rural blackness of the village street. ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... earth trembled. A horror of wrath and darkness has overwhelmed the world; and what of the patient choristers now? No longer are their voices heard amid the appalling fury of the hurricane; the sudden lightning-flash reveals nothing in the blackness; the powers of evil have overcome; and the universe has lost its hope. But now there comes a lull; and suddenly—far away, and faint, and triumphant—rises the song of reliance and joy. The demons ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... no particular theory at all on the front of it;" and of its leaders, "I can only speak of the revelations these men have made to me. As to their doctrines, there is nothing definite or precise to be said"; yet he asserts that Goethe, Richter, and the rest, took him "out of the blackness and darkness of death." This is nearly the feeling that his disciples of forty years ago entertained towards himself; but their discipleship has rarely lasted through life. They came to his writings, inspired by the youthful enthusiasm that carries with it a vein of credulity, intoxicated by their ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... the night wore slowly away. The intense impenetrable blackness, the roar and thunder of the sea, the terrible jerking, jolting and hurling beneath them, shook the nerves of the girls, keeping them constantly in a half-dazed condition that perhaps lessened the keenness of their suffering. Harriet and Jane, however, never ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls by the Sea - Or The Loss of The Lonesome Bar • Janet Aldridge
... been lighted in his camp, but nevertheless he was not a shadow. That personality, quiet and modest, was so intense, so powerful that it seemed to Harry to become luminous, to radiate light in the blackness of the night. It was imagination, he knew, at work again, but it was Jackson who had ...
— The Star of Gettysburg - A Story of Southern High Tide • Joseph A. Altsheler
... before her, and her heart ached. Fiercely, despairingly she thought, throwing her soul afar to seek out wisdom and a way of escape for Rames. Presently in the blackness of her mind there arose a plan and, as ever was her fashion, she acted swiftly. Lifting her head she commanded that the doors should be locked and guarded so that none might go in or out, and that those physicians ...
— Morning Star • H. Rider Haggard
... for her! and poor Herbert too who would acutely feel this ingratitude. The blackness of it was beyond what Julius thought probable in the lad, and the discussion of it occupied the brothers till they reached the Reynolds colony, where they were received by the daughter-in-law, a much more ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... stones. They seemed to lie in a vacuum, in the very hollow of the storm. Around them the clatter, the clang and the uproar were even more terrifying than before because they were now separated from these noises, no longer a part of them. All was blackness, shot through with fire. Haig was no more tortured in his body, except for the sense of being suffocated. He seemed to inhale raw ozone; the air fairly stank with the odors of decomposition; the saliva in his mouth had a peculiar ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... spots of heaven,/More fiery by night's blackness] If by spots are meant stars, as night has no other fiery spots, the comparison is forced and harsh, stars having been always supposed to beautify the night; nor do I comprehend what there is in the counter-part of this simile, which answers to night's blackness. ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... through utter darkness. The stream was narrow—so narrow that in the blackness I was constantly bumping first one rock wall and then another as the river wound hither and ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... station-house. One of the agents with a picket of a few of our blacks, armed for the purpose, was keeping guard over the ivory; but deep within the forest, red gleams that wavered, that seemed to sink and rise from the ground amongst confused columnar shapes of intense blackness, showed the exact position of the camp where Mr. Kurtz's adorers were keeping their uneasy vigil. The monotonous beating of a big drum filled the air with muffled shocks and a lingering vibration. A steady droning sound of many men chanting each to himself some weird incantation ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... harvest, mixed with an abundant supply of water, would already have generated the flame-bright liquid which dyes the robes that adorn the throne. The colour of that dye is gay[211] with too great beauty; 'tis a blushing obscurity, an ensanguined blackness, which distinguishes the wearer from all others, and makes it impossible for the human race not to know who is the king. It is marvellous that that substance after death should for so long a time exude an amount of gore which one would hardly find flowing from the wounds of a ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... The wind freshens, the twilight softens the distances, and while the long road behind him still glitters, it grows darker now at every step—like the past, with its retrospections to him who looks back and regrets. It seems to Monpavon that he is walking into blackness. He shivers a little, but does not falter, and continues to walk with erect head and ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... like a man because his shoes were too high-heeled. Excepting when he was with the army, he would never get on horseback. The soldiers used to say that he was more afraid of being sun-burnt and of the blackness of the powder than of the musket-balls; and it was very true. He was very fond of building. Before he had the Palais Royal completed, and particularly the grand apartment, the place was, in my opinion, perfectly horrible, although in the Queen-mother's time it had been very ...
— The Memoirs of the Louis XIV. and The Regency, Complete • Elizabeth-Charlotte, Duchesse d'Orleans
... cried Achelous, turning toward the hero, while his voice rose till it sounded like the thunder of distant cataracts, and his green garment changed to the blackness of night,—"impertinent stranger! how darest thou claim this maiden,—thou who hast mortal blood in thy veins! Behold me, the god Achelous, the powerful King of the Waters! I wind with majesty through the rich lands of my wide realms. I make all fields through which I flow ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... muttered the explorer, returning from a peep into the foul blackness of a subterranean tunnel, "imagine what took place ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... of fifteen minutes, Hannibal entered. He had the look of one who had passed a sleepless night, and despite the blackness of his complexion, ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... Away through the blackness swept the little torpedo-boat, with not a light showing anywhere on board her. The men had even been forbidden to smoke; and the stokers down below put coal on as carefully as though the furnaces were a lady's drawing-room ...
— Under the Chilian Flag - A Tale of War between Chili and Peru • Harry Collingwood
... insensible, but I was dead to surrounding objects, dead to the present, dead to the future. The past, the terrible, the inexorable past, was upon me, trampling me, grinding me with iron heel, into the dust of the grave. I could not move, for its nightmare weight crushed me. I could not see, for its blackness shrouded me; nor hear, for its shrieks deafened me. Had I remained long in that awful condition, I ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... the breakers on the beach, which had been loud at the mouth of the cavern, began to fade and grow faint, and the tunnel grew dark and cold. Feeling for the wall of the passage with one hand, the youngest son advanced into the blackness. Creatures of the sea, with round shining eyes, stared at him from shallow pools, and now and then his hand, running along the wall, would touch and shake from its place a starfish ...
— The Firelight Fairy Book • Henry Beston
... Then the blackness of the pit arose and filled the heart of Burney. Sucking the corpse of his deceased dudheen, he staggered through his duties with his barrowful of stones and dirt, feeling for the first time that the ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... minutes later, I was stopped in a dark quiet alley by a hand on the back of my neck. I saw no one. I heard no noise of breathing. In the pitch blackness of the night the hand arrested me. It was like my spine suddenly stiffening to a rod of ice. "Quiet," said a strange voice before I could scream. "Off with those Dutch clothes. Put on these. Off with those sabots." I was in a suit of English ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... all round the ship for a distance of about a couple of hundred yards; but inshore of us the shadow of the island lay jet-black upon the surface of the water, completely hiding all evidence of movement in that direction, even when I attempted to probe the blackness with the night glass. Therefore we were obliged to trust quite as much to our ears as to our eyes for warning of the approach of an enemy; but even they did not help us much, for the island was but a small one, and the thunder of the surf upon ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... as it was dark, for the wind, light all through the preceding twenty hours, had at length fallen away to nothing, and the ship was motionless, save for the slight heave of the swell which, stealing along through the blackness, would occasionally take her under the counter and give her a gentle lift that would cause all her spars to creak and her canvas to rustle with a pattering of reef-points, a jerk and rattle of hemp and chain sheets, and a faint click of cabin doors upon their hooks, the whole accompanied, ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... bush he could see to screen himself. He held his breath and listened. Now he crept forward a foot at a time. Now he advanced swiftly for yards. He worked his way to the right and the left. But nowhere could he see what he was searching for, and no betraying sound came out of the thick blackness. ...
— The Secret Wireless - or, The Spy Hunt of the Camp Brady Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... had set, and almost immediately the darkness descended, as though the light had been turned off at a switch. The earth shrunk to a pool of blackness, and the heavens expanded to a glory of tropical stars. All visible nature contracted to the light thrown by the flickering fires before the tiny white tents. The tatterdemalion crew had, after the curious habit of Africans, cast aside its garments, and sat forth in a bronze ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... as he was speaking, a small cloud appeared on the horizon, and as it approached grew larger, until the heavens were overcast. Then drawing his bow to its utmost tension, he let fly the arrow, which sped up into the gathering blackness, and was lost to view. Presently the sky was illumined with a vivid flash, and peal upon peal of thunder followed in rapid succession. The crowd dispersed, running to their lodges in the greatest confusion; but the great warrior who had brought ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... John of Hainault seized the bridle of King Philip's horse and led him away, led him away from the danger and tumult of the battle-field. Out into the quiet country they rode in silence, with five horsemen only following them. On they journeyed through the blackness of the night and on until they reached Amiens. But of their flight or journey or destination, not one of the victors thought or cared, for the battle-field had become the seat of wild rejoicing ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... speed he lighted his lamp, but the flaring name illuminated only a little space in the brooding, hovering blackness about him. ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... creeper, that give a glimpse and a hint—no more—of a fairy-land of shelter and fountains within. I have seen such palaces stand in quiet and stately parks, as old, as majestic, as finely proportioned as the buildings of Oxford; but the very blackness of the city air, and the drifting smoke of the town, gives that added touch of grimness and mystery that the country airs cannot communicate. And even fairer sights are contained within; those panelled, dark-roofed halls, with their array of portraits gravely and intently regarding the ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... flash of lightning. Bitterest of all was the thought that I must now bid everlasting farewell to this beautiful being I had found in the solitude this lustrous daughter of the Didi—just when I had won her from her shyness—that I must go away into the cursed blackness of death and never know the mystery of her life! It was that which utterly unnerved me, and made my legs tremble under me, and brought great drops of sweat to my forehead, until I thought that the venom was already doing its swift, fatal work in ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... branch of the river), and drew up on the bank. They announced to us then that we were to walk a mile through the woods, to a house. I think no white man, even the most surly of our drivers, would have asked us to do that,—in perfect blackness, the trees wet and dripping,—but would have managed to bring us to some inhabited place. They started off at a rapid gait, and we followed. We could not see their forms; but one carried something white in ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... Franciscan;—there are the Black Hussars of the Bandiera della Morte, and there are the Scots Grays whose horses can run upon the rock. But if you ask me, as I would have you ask me, why argent and why sable, how baptized in white like a bride or a novice, and how hooded with blackness like a Judge of the Vehmgericht Tribunal,—I leave these questions with ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... of storm and blackness they crossed the Saranac; dividing in two bodies they crawled unseen, one on each side of the battery. Three hundred British soldiers were sleeping near, only the sentries peered into ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... and the stars winked at her, they were green diamonds that sparkled through chinks in the alder leafage overhead: round dark leaves like coins, and scattered in clusters, like branches of black bloom. Near at hand the river ran in silken blackness, but below the coppice, where it widened into shallows, it went whispering and rippling over a pebbly bottom on its way to the humming thunder of the mill. And in a fir-tree not far off a nightingale was singing, now a string of pearls dropping bead by bead from his throat, ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... conscious of the blackness of his crime, which indeed was of the deepest dye, and that he had never till then experienced the arm of vengeance. He shuddered as the violence of the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 393, October 10, 1829 • Various
... motionless, breathless. A moment; then into the room came Wolfgar. He did not speak. Advancing close to us as we stood transfixed, he jerked an instrument from his belt. It whirred and hummed in his hand. The room around us went black—a barrage of blackness and silence, with ourselves and Wolfgar in a pale glow standing within it as in a cylinder. The isolation-barrage. I had never been within one before, though upon drastic occasion they were ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... herself settling back against the cantle of the saddle. A little later she realized that they were going down the opposite side of the rise, and a moment later they were again on a level. A deeper blackness than they had yet encountered rose on their right, and Sheila correctly decided it to be caused by a stretch of wood that she had observed from the crest of the rise where she had halted her pony for a view of the country. After an interval, during which she debated the wisdom of directing ...
— The Trail to Yesterday • Charles Alden Seltzer
... he climbed the steep step, throwing the candle rays ahead of him into the gloom of the gallery. Not a sound. The silence of death was in the big church.... Muttering to himself, he traversed the long aisle at the top of the gallery, peering down into the vacant seats that edged the blackness below. ...
— Unfinished Portraits - Stories of Musicians and Artists • Jennette Lee
... a great body in the darkness at the mouth of the lean-to. Grasping his rifle, he fired at the vague, threatening shadow, but must have missed, for immediately afterwards he heard the smashing of the underwood as the thing, whatever it was, rushed off into the impenetrable blackness of the forest and ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... man's outward form remained, but all hell was within it. Furious lust, and hate that was like fire, and the loss of all hope and horror that seemed to shriek aloud to the night, though his teeth were shut; and the utter blackness of despair. I am sure he did not see me; he saw nothing that you or I can see, but he saw what I hope we never shall. I do not know when he died; I suppose in an hour, or perhaps two, but when I passed down Ashley Street ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... crowd of beauty that has been so profusely lavished on the youthful in this country, she would not have been at all remarked in a large assembly of young American girls. Her face was pleasing nevertheless; and there was a piquant contrast between the raven blackness of her hair the deep blue of her eyes, and the dazzling whiteness of her skin. Her colour, too, was high, and changeful with her emotions. As for teeth, she had a set that one might have travelled weeks to meet with their equals; and, though she seemed ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... and yet in the inky blackness of the room accurate hunting down was difficult. It was like a duel between blind men. Thor was moving uncertainly, pausing from second to second to fix the object ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... They seemed a portent, though in truth they were something less. They found themselves left alone to their private griefs, ruminating regretfully over the golden age that had suddenly ended, gazing into the blackness of a ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... A great blackness settled over the waters. To Anne, always an impressionable girl, it was as though all life had suddenly been obliterated from the face of them. Her hand tightened its grasp on Sara's fingers, for as the vessel plunged along there was a palpable impression that the flotilla, now hurrying ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... Leonard leaned back in his bunk, quite sleepless now. He stared into the blackness, his mind a moving picture show of the last three days. The Englishman was chief actor on this stage, and his disagreeably mixed character puzzled and disturbed the American. Caradoc's language and manners showed him to be a man of ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... middest night, a vast figure rose slowly from the abyss, and its wings threw blackness over the world. High upward to the throne of the discontented star sailed the fearful shape, and the star trembled on his throne when the form stood before him face to face. And the shape said: ...
— The Fallen Star; and, A Dissertation on the Origin of Evil • E. L. Bulwer; and, Lord Brougham
... rude, and perhaps was hurting it; but she did want, she said to herself, to see what secret it carried so carefully hidden; and she found its golden heart. But now, right under her eyes, inside the veil of her hair, in the sweet twilight of whose blackness she could see it perfectly, stood a daisy with its red tip opened wide into a carmine ring, displaying its heart of gold on a platter of silver. She did not at first recognize it as one of those cones come awake, but a moment's ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... that partaketh Of the couch she sheweth to him. Seek of wisdom, and refrain thee From the path whereon she lurketh; She will draw thy vigor from thee, And thy spirit to destruction. There is sin, in all its blackness, Spreading wide its vile infection. Like unto a thief it stealeth Through the crowded lanes and alleys; And appeareth, robed more gaily, Yet as hideous in its purpose, In the dwellings of the lofty, On their walks and promenadings. Here ...
— A Leaf from the Old Forest • J. D. Cossar
... decision came back with a sudden rush, as it were, and thrusting out a foot, I kicked the door so that it swung sharply back to its full extent, and permitted me to walk forward slowly into the aperture of profound blackness beyond. What a queer soft sound my bare feet made on the boards! How the blood sang and ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... plainly that not only the Pope and the ex-Emperor of France will probably disappear this year from the scenes of their glory, but that the Sun, over which a certain dirty mistiness has been stealing for some time past, will be entirely shrouded in the blackness of ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., Issue 31, October 29, 1870 • Various
... them both, and sat brooding, clothed in the blackness that blindness brought when it suddenly loomed before him as the wall between him and his life's desires. The brief instant Claire had been in his arms had made him feel that his life was intolerable without her, and that blindness was the curse of a double living ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... ward's money by lending it to Undy; but that acute gentleman saw clearly that he could not contend against the fact of the property having been fraudulently used; but he saw that he might induce the jury to attach so much guilt to Undy, that Tudor would, as it were, be whitened by the blackness of the other's villany. The judge, he well knew, would blow aside all this froth; but then the judge could ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... against the ever fiercer buffets of the storm, Katherine gave Nelly free rein to pick her own way at her own pace through the blackness. The rain volleyed into her pitilessly, the wind sought furiously to wrest her from the saddle, the lightning cracked open the heavens into ever more fiery chasms, and the thunder rattled and rolled and reverberated as though a thousand battles were waging in the valley. It was as if the earth's ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... to the plantations. Sometimes their feelings were raised to the utmost pitch of horror by the sight of sculls and bones scattered on the ground—a certain indication that the bodies had been devoured by wild beasts; and in other places they saw the blackness of ashes amidst the relics,—the ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... except her soft replies to his questions. The western clouds rolled up in great volumes of black and grey, rolling and gathering and spreading at a magnificent rate. The sun was presently hid behind the fringe of this curtain of blackness; by and by the mountains were hid beneath a further fringe of rain; a very thick fringe. Between, the masses of vapour in the sky seemed charging for a tremendous outburst. It had not come yet when the slow going little wagon passed through Crum ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 1 • Susan Warner
... streets; not a light in a window. He left the little town behind, passed the last isolated house on the road, and walked into the greater blackness of a road between tall hedges. He had put on canvas shoes with rubber soles, for the better surprise of Mr. Farrer, and his own progress seemed to partake of a ghostly nature. Every ghost story he had ever heard or read crowded into his memory. For the first time in his experience ...
— Night Watches • W.W. Jacobs
... Kenyon. "Sin has educated Donatello, and elevated him. Is sin, then,—which we deem such a dreadful blackness in the universe,—is it, like sorrow, merely an element of human education, through which we struggle to a higher and purer state than we could otherwise have attained? Did Adam fall, that we might ultimately rise to a far loftier paradise than his?" "O hush!" cried Hilda, shrinking ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... house a small hatch stood open. It led to a narrow iron ladder that ran almost perpendicularly down into the dark depths below. The boys peered into the blackness without being able to ...
— A Voyage with Captain Dynamite • Charles Edward Rich
... the reaches of the pond. Above, the sky's day surface unfolded and receded and dissolved and melted away until, through the pale afterglow, one saw beyond into the infinities. Down by the sluice a dozen lanterns flickered and blinked yellow against the blue-blackness of the night. ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... Heselton's forehead. "This is bad, Rogers. Mighty bad." Nervously, he walked across to the right of the bridge and stood, hands clasped behind his back, staring blankly out at blackness and the scattered stars. "I know there is a ship out there, and I know that a ship simply can't be invisible, ...
— A Matter of Magnitude • Al Sevcik
... alone to say their prayers. It was always very dark with the little red light burning before the altar and two tapers that they lit beneath a statue of the Virgin, old and black and ill-carved by antique hands centuries before. And, in that blackness, they knelt, invisible almost, and still in the black gowns that they put on for prayers, beside a low pillar that gloomed out at their sides and vanished up into the darkness of ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford
... followed the gesture of the Egyptian, and beheld with dismay a vast vapor shooting from the summit of Vesuvius in the form of a gigantic pine-tree; the trunk, blackness—the breaches fire!—a fire that shifted and wavered in its hues with every moment, now fiercely luminous, now of a dull and dying red, that again blazed terrifically ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... having and still have the grippe, the result of it for your Cruchard, is a general lassitude accompanied by a violent (or rather a profound) melancholy. While spitting and coughing beside my fire, I muse over my youth. I dream of all my dead friends, I wallow in blackness! Is it the result of a too great activity for the past eight months, or the radical absence of the feminine element in my life? But I have never felt more abandoned, more empty, more bruised. What you said to me (in your last letter) about ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... began. In the velvet blackness came two white eyes, milky, opalescent, small, far away,—awful eyes, like a dead dream. More beautiful than I can describe, the flakes of white flame moving from the perimeter inward, disappearing in the centre, like a ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... stood in the lee of the donkey-engine house, to the water's edge was a full hundred feet, and yet even so, whenever he stepped out into the open, it was only to be drenched with spray. And out there in the blackness, twenty miles offshore, it would be blowing good; out there on the edge of that bank, in the hollow of the short, high, ugly seas, was a rolling, battered light-ship; as helpless as—well, there was nothing ashore to compare to her helplessness. And when ...
— Wide Courses • James Brendan Connolly
... stairs, slipping his lean fingers lightly along the balusters. He turned to the right at the loop, and I followed him barefooted along a thickly-carpeted corridor. At the end stood a door ajar. And from here we very stealthily and in complete blackness ascended five narrow stairs. Seaton, with immense caution, slowly pushed open a door and we stood together looking into a great pool of duskiness, out of which, lit by the feeble clearness of a night-light, rose a vast ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... popular with us; and will, I fear, find but few purchasers in the richly garnished repertoire of the worthy Colnaghi. Indeed it is a painful, and almost repulsive, subject. Laugier's portrait of Le Vicomte de Chateaubriand exhibits his prevailing error of giving blackness, rather than depth, to his shadows. Black hair, a black cravat, and black collar to the coat—with the lower part of the background almost "gloomy as night"—are not good accessories. This worthy engraver lives at present with his wife, an agreeable and unaffected little woman, up four pair of ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... step continued again, down the short hall. A hand fell on the knob of the door and pressed it slowly open. Against the deeper blackness of the hall beyond, Buck saw a tall figure, hatless. His finger curved about the trigger, and still he did not fire. Even to his hysterical brain it occurred that Dan Barry would be wearing a hat—and moreover the form ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... to betray. His moral insensibility appeared but to be deepened as his gaze was now fixed with rigid intensity on the temple portico. Thus he continued to remain motionless, as if what he saw had petrified him where he stood, when the clouds, which had been closing in deeper and deeper blackness as the morning advanced, and which, still charged with electricity, were gathering to revive the storm of the past night, burst abruptly into a loud peal ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... of putting the best of Robert Louis Stevenson into German, or Kipling's rollicking ballads of soldier life into Spanish, or Walter Pater into Dutch, or Edgar Allan Poe into Russian! The one language common to us all, music, tells as many tales as there are men to hear. Each melody melts into the blackness or the brightness of the listener's soul and becomes a thousand melodies instead of one. What does the moaning monotony of a Korean love-song mean to the westerner, or what does the Swan song mean to the Korean? Only God knows. We can never translate one nation ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... hand in one of hers, and with Mark on the other side walked down the path to the road. The darkness was intense there, because of the gigantic pine-tree which towered above the little house. "Are you there, Paul?" she called through the blackness. The little boy's voice came back, "Yes, with Toucle, we're ahead." The ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... the candle-flame when it vanishes into blackness and what becomes of sound when the great maw of silence digests it. But what science can know the destiny of the pins and pins and pins, and what is the oblivion which swallows that great army of street-walking ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... London, swart and grim, semi-shrouded in a warm close mist of mingled human breath and acrid vapour steaming up from the clammy crowded streets,—London, with a million twinkling lights gleaming sharp upon its native blackness, and looking, to a dreamer's eye, like some gigantic Fortress, built line upon line and tower upon tower,—with huge ramparts raised about it frowningly as though in self-defence against Heaven. Around and above it ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... assist her; the bigotry of patriotism rejected her for her birth,—the scrupulousness of modesty, for her history. The night, that consecrated so many homes and gathered together so many families in innocence and repose, was to her blacker than its own blackness in misery and turpitude; the morning, that radiated gladness over the face of the world, revealed the extent and exaggerated the sense of her own degradation. But the vision of Jesus had alighted upon her; she had seen him speeding on his errands of mercy; she ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... Darkness. Bonnily and bravely they sail away there, but before the blast blows by they'll be wrecked; and red wine and strong brandy will be as rife as dyke-water, and we'll drink the health of bonnie Bell Blackness out of ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... with an arch toss of the head, she turned her great black eyes rogueishly upon me, and said in a half whisper that I must not attempt it again. But I could not resist the magic of her glance, while, together with the cherry-like freshness of her lips, and the raven blackness of those glossy curls that hung so ravishingly over her fair blushing cheeks, discovering a delicately arched brow, and enhancing the sweetness of her oval face, carried me away captive, and made it seem as if heaven had created our loves to flow on in one unhallowed stream of ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... the foreman, like himself was stationed somewhere off there in the blackness, sitting on his pony as immovable as a statue, his straining eyes peering into the night, his ears keyed to catch ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Montana • Frank Gee Patchin
... as he spoke he swung his huge bulk out of the boat and up the bank by the vines that had served him in coming, disappearing from sight and sound swiftly and silently as a great cat. Little and Barry leaned towards each other, seeking to discern features and expressions. It was hopeless in the blackness, but Barry's feelings ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... I saw my mother bending over a little child in my bed in the old house in Oxfordshire where I was born, and then—blackness! ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... sense of being whirled at a terrific speed into some subterranean suck of waters. There was nothing to do but wait. We struck rocks and went rolling, shipping buckets of water at every dip. Then there was a long sickening swoop through utter blackness. It ended abruptly with a ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... the heart, when hope has fled; When vanishes each prospect fair, When the last flickering ray has sped, And naught remains but mute despair; When inky blackness doth enshroud The hopes the heart once held in store, As some tall pine, by great winds bowed, Doth snap, and when the tempest's o'er, Its noble form, magnificent and proud, Doth prostrate lie, nor ever riseth ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... In the blackness of night, the last despairing cry of many expiring souls filled the ears of the survivors, acute with terror, until they, in turn, becoming exhausted, would unresistingly glide into the seething foam, to be swallowed up by ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... time I sat there trying to pierce the blackness of the room beyond the window with my straining eyes, deeply sensitive to a curiosity that had as its basic force the very natural anxiety to know what disposition she had made of the rest of her person in order to ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... vessel that had brought them from Callernish, went silently toward the shore, and up the narrow road leading to the house. It was a square, two-storied substantial building of stone, but the stone had been liberally oiled to keep out the wet, and the blackness thus produced had not a very cheerful look. Then, on this particular evening the scant bushes surrounding the house hung limp and dark in the rain, and amid the prevailing hues of purple, blue-green and blue the bit of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... of his cigar, and grunted irritably. Inside Charing Cross Station business was proceeding as usual. Porters wheeling baggage-trucks moved to and fro like Juggernauts. Belated trains clanked in, glad to get home, while others, less fortunate, crept reluctantly out through the blackness and disappeared into an inferno of detonating fog-signals. For outside the fog still held. The air was cold and raw and tasted coppery. In the street traffic moved at a funeral pace, to the accompaniment of hoarse cries and occasional ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... Always in front of us hovered an archway of frosted silver, moving as we moved, like a pale, elusive rainbow; and when we put on extra speed for a long, straight stretch, poplars carelessly spared by the Boches spouted up on either side of us like geysers. Then, suddenly, across a stretch of blackness palely shone Compiegne, as Venice ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... wildest dream fulfilled in this strange fashion, seemed to be walking in her sleep. She obeyed her father's orders without a word to him or to Angelot, threw on a cloak, and followed them and the Cure down the steep blackness of the winding stairs. At the door her father put out his light, and it was his hand that guided her through the long grass and bushes in the moat, while Angelot gave all his care to the old priest. At the top of the steps, as the four hastily crossed into ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... and uniformly sombre. Far and near, innumerable chimneys sent forth fumes of various density broad-flung jets of steam, coldly white against the murky distance; wan smoke from lime-kilns, wafted in long trails; reek of solid blackness from pits and forges, voluming aloft and far-floated by the ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing
... honorable either to her or to them. She saw that it was all, at no distant day, to have an end, and that when the end should come, her life would practically be closed. When the means by which she had held so many men in her power were exhausted, her power would cease. Into the blackness of that coming night she could not bear to look. It was full of hate, and disappointment, and despair. She knew that there was a taint upon her—the taint that comes to every woman, as certainly ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... self to God without reserve. Though in appearance He leaves us for a time to prove and exercise our faith, yet He never fails us, when our need of Him is the more pressing. One may say with the Scripture, "It is God who bringeth down to the gates of death, and raiseth up again." The blackness and swelling of my nose went away and I believe, had they continued to bleed me, I had been pretty easy. For want of that I grew worse again. The malady fell into my eyes, and inflamed them with such severe pain, that I thought I ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... hot bath fifteen seconds will be sufficient, but if a cooler development is used, or the prints are solarized in the shadows, more time should be allowed. When the deep shadows are solarized, or appear lighter than surrounding parts, a hot and prolonged development is required to obtain sufficient blackness, as they have a tendency to look like brown paper. I have found breathing on solarized shadows useful, as in the presence of slight moisture they begin to print out and become dark before development, getting ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 711, August 17, 1889 • Various
... pangs of the lover are described just as they are described in the case of his [Shakspere's] Orlando—dishevelled hair, blackness under the eyes, disordered dress, a desire for solitude, and the habit of writing the girl's name on every tree—symptoms which are perhaps now regarded as natural, and which many romantic personages have no doubt imitated because they found them in literature, ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... coloured black like the coalfields in an atlas of physical geography, certain races would be signalised by their opaqueness. If such a map were ever compiled, Australia would of necessity be characterised by blackness; such a blackness, indeed, that jet itself would be as snowy white beside it. But why should this lamentable state of things be said of Australians, who claim to be progressive in their ideas and advanced in their ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... swim, Phil lay over on his back, floated and began blinking industriously to get the water out of his eyes. He soon found that he could see once more, though at that moment there was nothing to be seen in the blackness of the night. ...
— The Circus Boys On the Mississippi • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... and murder him under the pretence of sheltering him from the storm and giving him a hearty welcome at his table? Who could believe that even devils in human shape could cut the throats of two traveling strangers to obtain two watches, $80 and a pair of saddle-bags? I shudder at the blackness of the crime. It occurred only yesterday, and we are at this moment near the spot where the horrid deed was committed. Two other murders have lately been committed near this place. A stranger was found hung on a tree and a traveler was murdered near Shawneetown ...
— Narrative of Richard Lee Mason in the Pioneer West, 1819 • Richard Lee Mason
... be far from La Dorada now,' said Toffy, steering between the lines of stakes; 'but I can't see any signs of the steamer in this blackness.' ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... my way on Till I felt where the foldskirts fly open. Then once more I 20 prayed, And opened the foldskirts and entered, and was not afraid But spoke, "Here is David, thy servant!" And no voice replied. At the first I saw naught but the blackness; but soon I descried A something more black than the blackness—the vast, the upright Main prop which sustains the pavilion; and slow into sight 25 Grew a figure against it, gigantic and blackest of all. Then a sunbeam, that burst ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... poetry, yet with a pathos infinitely deeper, our Milton makes Love the child of Loneliness:[2] a parentage evinced by the terrible melancholy of Love when he cannot find his proper object, and the blank desolation and despair of the frightful void and blackness left behind, when he has lost it. But now, it is just this intolerable loneliness which makes him idealise the commonplace, and see all things in the light of his own yearning, creating for himself visions of unimaginable happiness, ...
— Bubbles of the Foam • Unknown
... uncanny, yet the pleasure in mere noise and dancing is childish and harmless. The picture is imposing and beautiful in its simplicity, gruesome in its wildness and sensuality, and splendid with the red lights which play on the shining, naked bodies. In the blackness of the night nothing is visible but that red-lit group of two or three hundred men, careless of to-morrow, given up entirely to the pleasure of the moment. The spectacle lasts all night, and the crowd becomes more and more wrought up, the leaps ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... further one, with its apse behind. The image of St. Pancras himself stood against a pillar with the light from the lamp beneath flickering against his feet. But Christopher's eyes soon came back to the centre, beyond the screen, where a row of blackness on either side in the stalls, marked where the monks rested back, and where he would soon be resting with them. There were candles lighted at sparse intervals along the book-rests, that shone up into ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... in those few minutes and Thomson found himself in the street again. He guided his way by the railings into Whitehall. The blackness seemed to him to be now less impenetrable. Looking fixedly eastward he seemed to be conscious of some faint lightening in the sky. He heard the rumbling of carts in the road, the horses mostly being led by their drivers. Here and there, ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... collar of her gray tweed coat, painfully climbed out—the muscles of her back racking—and examined the state of the rear wheels. They were buried to the axle; in front of them the mud bulked in solid, shiny blackness. She took out her jack and chains. It was too late. There was no room to get the jack under the axle. She remembered from the narratives of motoring friends that brush in mud gave a firmer surface for ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... races; lured on to a career of sacrifice and contempt. If he could only keep the hope that had hallowed its sufferings. But now it was a viper—not a divine hope—it had nourished in its bosom. He felt so lonely; a great stretch of blackness, a barren mere, a gaunt cliff on a frozen sea, a pine on a mountain. To be done with it all—the sighs and the sobs and the tears, the heart-sinking, the dull dragging days of wretchedness and the nights of pain. How ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... accrue to the venerable—solidly seated or even throned, hooded and draped and tucked-in, with big protective protrusive ears to her chair which helped it to the effect of a shrine, and a large face in which the odd blackness of eyebrow and of a couple of other touches suggested the conventional marks of a painted image. She signified her wants as divinities do, for I recover from her presence neither sound nor stir, remembering of her only that, as described ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... pausing for a while to listen for sounds of pursuit, and at last, with minds relieved, if not quite certain, plodded on into the obscurity. They had entered, it seemed, an aisle of a forest which stretched, darkly impenetrable, on either side. Before them, blackness, darkness within dark, like a cave, a smell of dampness like a dungeon. The sky lightened for a moment and they saw the shape of leaves and tree fronds far above them like a pattern on a carpet—a pattern which changed ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... foreground the solemn trees of Snakes Island, one great branch stretching upward, bare and moveless, from the side, like an arm raised to heaven in wonder or in menace towards the house; the lake, in part swept by the icy splendour of the moon, trembling with a dazzling glimmer, and farther off lost in blackness; the Fells rising from a base of gloom, into ribs and peaks white with snow, and looking against the pale sky, thin and transparent as a haze. Right across to the storied woods of Cloostedd, and the old domains of the ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... without waiting for an answer. When Vedie came in, fifteen minutes later, to clear the table, she found her mistress pale and moist with perspiration, in spite of the season. Flore felt like a woman who had fallen to the bottom of a precipice; the future loomed black before her; and on its blackness, in the far distance, were shapes of monstrous things, indistinctly perceptible, and terrifying. She felt the damp chill of vaults, instinctive fear of the man crushed her; and yet a voice cried in her ear that she deserved to have ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... gloomily, there was a low muttering of thunder, and dense black masses of cloud rose heavily behind the broken peaks. At first they were gayly fringed with silver by the afternoon sun, but soon the thick blackness overspread the whole sky, and the desert around us was wrapped in deep gloom. I scarcely heeded it at the time, but now I cannot but feel that there was an awful sublimity in the hoarse murmuring of the thunder, in the somber shadows ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... sentimental perplexities. But they only slumbered, and they were sharply awakened. The weather was fine, and the two young men always sat together upon deck late into the evening. One night, toward the last, they were at the stern of the great ship, watching her grind the solid blackness of the ocean into phosphorescent foam. They talked on these occasions of everything conceivable, and had the air of having no secrets from each other. But it was on Roderick's conscience that this air ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... moment it had caught fire. Licking up the curl, the flame gradually leaped from one piece of wood to another until the entire handful was ablaze. The dancing light played upon the three faces and sent a glow out into the surrounding blackness. Harry deposited the burning shavings upon the floor, where the fire was soon transmitted to the larger piece of wood ...
— Boy Scouts Mysterious Signal - or Perils of the Black Bear Patrol • G. Harvey Ralphson
... stage of her progress, and whilst the agonizing question seemed yet as indeterminate as ever, Kate's struggle with despair, which had been greatly soothed by the fervor of her prayer, revolved upon her in deadlier blackness. All turned, she saw, upon a race against time, and the arrears of the road; and she, poor thing! how little qualified could she be, in such a condition, for a race of any kind; and against two such obstinate brutes as time and space! This hour of the progress, this noontide of Kate's struggle, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... to look out of the window, staring vainly into blackness between the parted curtains. As she turned back, passing the writing-table, she noticed that Cicely's irruption had made her forget to post her letters—an unusual oversight. A glance at the clock told her that she was not too late for the mail—reminding ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... the grief that ye may not remove the disgrace, That brands with the blackness of hell all your race; 'Tis the sorrow that nothing may cleanse ye of shame, That has wrought us to madness, and filled ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... with reality amid rending and shattering sounds that lingered dimly. Blackness engulfed him ...
— Flamedown • Horace Brown Fyfe
... just turned to go when the sound of a man's heavy, measured footsteps, approaching from the opposite direction, fell upon her ear. She looked up half in dread, and strained her eyes out into the blackness of the night. It was too dark to see anything but the outline of a man's figure wrapped in a large cloak, coming slowly on toward her. As the man drew near she recognized the well-known figure, air and gait; she had of the identity. ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... took her basket again on her arm, came forth from her rock, and resumed the climb. She was obliged to make a good deal of noise, for it was too dark and uncomfortable to enable her to choose her steps well, Up above, the Burghers must have heard her plainly, though none but a keen eye would pick the blackness of her shape from the bosom of the night. The summit and the foot of the hill were alive with the spitting of the guns, and all the while the unknown sharpshooter searched about her for her life with clever plunging shots that flicked the dirt up. ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... was something distinctly eerie in the absolute darkness in which he found himself. He stretched out a hand and felt for the nearest wall like a blind man, groped his way to the door and opened it. But the other room was also in pitchy blackness. ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... swiftly pulled, passed them in the darkness, evidently coming from the shore to which they were being taken: it, too, carried no light. Nor were there any lights on the shore itself; all there was in utter blackness. They were on the shingle within a quarter of an hour; within a minute or two the yachtsmen had helped all three on to the beach, had carried up certain boxes and packages which had been placed in the boat, had set down ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... and with the day comes "a hope" but during the blackness I had "a suffer"— I read until two—five hours—and then slept until five when the middle man who had slept on my shoulder all night left the train and the second one to whom Bernardi was so polite left me alone and had the porter fit me up a bed so that I slept until seven again— Then ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... took advantage of the distractions among the English, and made an attempt to recover Boulogne and that territory which Henry VIII. had conquered from France, On other pretences, he assembled an army, and falling suddenly upon the Boulonnois, took the castles of Sellaque, Blackness, and Ambleteuse, though well supplied with garrisons, ammunition, and provisions.[*] He endeavored to surprise Boulenberg, and was repulsed; but the garrison, not thinking the place tenable after the loss of the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... towards the sky, but there seemed to be no sky, no moon, and no stars, only a vaporous blackness that came ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... Abounding to the Chief of Sinners," from the pen of the author of "Pilgrim's Progress." It is the record of a journey more terrible than that of the ideal Pilgrim; "truth stranger than fiction;" the painful upward struggling of a spirit from the blackness of despair and blasphemy, into the high, pure air of Hope and Faith. More earnest words were never written. It is the entire unveiling of a human heart, the tearing off of the fig-leaf covering of its sin. The voice which speaks ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... that he was now about to die, their minds confused, their eyes bedimmed, as if they saw before them nought but blackness, with hands conjoined, spake thus to Buddha: "Buddha is leaving now the pain of birth and death, and entering on the eternal joy of rest; doubtless we ought to rejoice thereat. Even as when a house is burnt a man rejoices if his friends are saved from out the flames; the gods! ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... on the figurative terms relating to beauty shows that the hair should be black, abundant, and wavy, the eyebrows dark and arched. The eyelashes also must be dark, and like arrows from the bow of the eyebrows. There is, however, no insistence on the blackness of the eyes. We hear of four varieties of eye: the dark-gray eye (or narcissus eye); the narrow, elongated eye of Turkish beauties; the languishing, or love-intoxicated, eye; and the wine-colored eye. Much stress is laid on the quality of brilliancy. The face is sometimes ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... of Hyssop, from one to two drops [279] should be the dose. Pliny said: "Hyssop mixed with figs, purges; with honey, vomits." If the herb be steeped in boiling water and applied hot to the part, it will quickly remove the blackness consequent upon a bruise or blow, especially in the case of "black" ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... day found us approaching the Lone City. We did not need to surmise now that Tao would be warned, for far away on the horizon ahead we saw the beams from his great projectors mounting up into the blackness of the sky. Some four miles from the Lone City the river we were ascending swept off to the right. This was its closest point to the city, and here we disembarked. There were several docks and a few houses, but we found them ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... smooth black canal between two steep white banks; and the glassy water seems momentarily stiffening into the solider blackness of ice. Here and there thin films are already formed over it, and are being constantly broken apart by the treacherous current; a flake a foot square is jerked away and goes sliding beneath the slight transparent surface till it reappears below. The same ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... always goes with blackness. Very good people indeed, you will notice, dress altogether in black, even to gloves and neckties, and they will probably take to black shirts before long. Medium goods indulge in light trousers on week-days, and some of them even go so ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... and were congratulating ourselves on our haven of safety when Ping! Ping! again from our rear came the messages from a sniper hidden there. In glancing back over my shoulder I noticed in the pitchy blackness the flash of a rifle simultaneously with the report, and it seemed to come from a haystack about 200 ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... fly thy hissing rout, Thy wake is followed by turmoil and din, Blackness and darkness track thy course without, And fire and groans ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... the northern hills begin with the basalt buttresses of Antrim and the granite ribs of Down, and pass through northern Ulster and Connacht to the headlands of Mayo and Galway. Their rear is held by the Donegal ranges, keeping guard against the blackness of the ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... beaches and mountain tops?), and, what was more to my purpose, was open on three sides. I passed a good deal of time there, first and last, and once it sheltered me from a drenching shower of an hour or two. The lightning was vivid, and the rain fell in sheets. In the midst of the blackness and commotion, a single tern, ghostly white, flew past, and toward the close a bunch of sanderlings came down the edge of the breakers, still looking for something to eat. The only other living things in sight were two young fellows, who had improved the ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... wandered free, like a blessed spirit invisible, while Prothero's brain agonized and journalized as Laura said. There was no compromise this time, no propitiation, no playing with the beautiful prose of his occasional essays. He plunged from his heavenly height sheer into the worst blackness of the pit; he contorted himself there in his obscure creation of paragraphs and columns. His spirit writhed like a fine flame, trammelled and tortured by the grossness of the stuff it kindled, and the more it writhed the more he piled on the paragraphs and columns. He seemed, Laura said, to take ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... The explosions of the engine, muffled though they were, seemed like rifle shots to ears newly accustomed to the silences of the night. But the speed of the motor increased rapidly, and she felt the damp of the river fog brushing her cheek. She could see nothing though she peered into the blackness eagerly. The car was rushing to destruction for all that she knew, yet Karl was driving straight and hard for the entrance of the bridge. Marishka saw the dim gleam of a lantern, heard a hoarse shout, and then the sound of shots lost in the crashing of the timbers ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... mood, and he turned his wheel towards the Sykes homestead once more. The motif was still as far beyond his grasp as ever; but there were other things in life besides elusive motifs. The increasing blackness above his head was one of them; his hunger was another, and he quickened his pace. His piano might be awaiting him in mute reproach; but then, so did Eulaly's doughnuts await him, and there was no reproach in those, at least, not until ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... in silence and were peering into the blackness of the night whence the sound apparently came. Anderson thought he saw a figure emerge from behind a tree far off in the distance and he immediately gave chase, opening fire as he did so. Several times he fired into ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... just the thing, only it needs something to relieve its blackness," said Mrs. Montague, while she mentally wondered at the richness of ...
— Mona • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... for 't. Would it were mine again: I had been where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest. Nay; there will be no rest for me. I am an apostate—a castaway—the devil that seduced me hath said it again and again—for whom is reserved the blackness of darkness, and the noisome pit for ever! But as long, look thee, as I keep this gold, I die not. No! though twice ten thousand were on my track; for I sold my grave to a doomed one; nor, till I buy another with the ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... in midsummer a man waking from a dreamless sleep in a forest lifted his head from the earth, and staring a few moments into the blackness, said: "Catherine Larue." He said nothing more; no reason was known to him why he ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... silence in the room. Jack stood by the chimney-piece, his hands upraised to rest upon its lofty shelf, his head dropped forward, and his eyes fixed on the empty blackness below. ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner
... was a loud explosion and the ship seemed to split in two, a blaze of red fire stretching high into the heavens from the middle of the vessel as it did so. Then blackness enveloped it again and the two parts of the ship fell back into the water with a hiss like that of a thousand serpents. The first German ...
— The Boy Allies with the Victorious Fleets - The Fall of the German Navy • Robert L. Drake
... and Paulina felt a momentary terror creep over her as she looked into the massy blackness of the dark alleys which ran up into the woods, forced into deeper shade under the glare of the lamps from the encampment. She now reflected with some alarm that the forest commenced at this point, stretching away (as she had been ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... he could do. He went to a few homes he knew, he went to the hospital to ask after the injured, he went to the morgue. At midnight the fire, like an evil thing, drew him back, and he encountered only a steamy blackness lit by the search-light of the engine. There was still the insistent throbbing. And then he thought of his mother and her fears, and sped swiftly up the street, over deserted Lexington Avenue, and up the lamp-lit block. Already ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... almond grove loomed up, casting a denser shade upon the surrounding blackness. The Count hastened his steps and in a few seconds stood among the trees. As he paused the figure of a man emerged from behind a huge fragment of rock and thus ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... said that the original copper plates of his works were captured by a British man-of-war during the Napoleonic conflict. This probably accounts for the dissemination of so many revamped and coarsely executed versions of his compositions. His besetting fault was a tendency toward an Egyptian blackness in his composition. Fond of strong contrasts as was John Martin, he is, at times, as great a sinner in the handling of his blacks. An experimenter of audacity, Piranesi's mastery of the technique of etching has seldom been equalled, and even in his inferior work the skilful printing ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... finger at the base where it joins the hand, as I thought there might be something in his story of the poison. Indeed, as I found afterwards on dissection, and can show you, for I have the thing in spirits, there was, for the blackness of which he spoke, a kind of mortification, I presume, had crept almost to the joint, though the flesh beyond was healthy enough. Certainly that Kalubi was a plucky fellow. He sat like a rock and never even winced. Indeed, when he saw that the flesh was sound he uttered a great sigh of relief. ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... valve from the air belt in order to help my sinking, and jumped overboard, feet foremost—for we hadn't a ladder. I left the boat pitching, and all of them staring down into the water after me, as my head sank down into the weeds and blackness that lay about the mast. I suppose nobody, not the most cautious chap in the world, would have bothered about a lookout at such a desolate place. It ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... ahead, trying to determine where the road led to. But all they could see was the blackness of the forest, and the roadway seemed to grow rougher and more perilous ...
— The Rover Boys on a Hunt - or The Mysterious House in the Woods • Arthur M. Winfield (Edward Stratemeyer)
... through the inferno of darkness stopped, as the rider below considered the latest move of the horseman above. They were so near that Judith could hear the labored breathing of the sweating horse. The blackness of the night had become a tangible thing. The towering mountains were one piece with the gaping precipice, the trail, the scrub pines, the gauntlet on her hand. The horse below resumed its stumbling ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... judgments; and whoever passed the club doors enjoyed already some of the immunities of the tomb. They drank to each other's memories, and to those of notable suicides in the past. They compared and developed their different views of death - some declaring that it was no more than blackness and cessation; others full of a hope that that very night they should be scaling the stars and commencing with the ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... entrance to that fiery furnace, in which the well-known three holy men had once intoned their song of praise; and the chimney above all, standing threateningly upright, with its wreath of pine soot at its mouth, which seemed to lead down into blackness ...
— Dame Care • Hermann Sudermann
... grace, Charles Archfield performed his devoir seriously, his little wife frisked with childish glee, evidently quite untaught, but Peregrine's light narrow feet sprang, pointed themselves, and bounded with trained agility, set off by the tight blackness of his suit. He was like one of the grotesque figures shaped in black paper, or as Sir Philip, looking in from the dining-parlour, observed, "like a light- ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the gulf surrounding the plateau on which the palace stood. All the way around that gulf a sheet of flame seemed to leap upward through smoke, and then, paralyzed, helpless, hypnotized by the spectacle, they saw the plateau and the palace sink and disappear into the blackness of a great void. Then, like a black funeral pall, the smoke rolled up about them and shut off ...
— Frank Merriwell Down South • Burt L. Standish
... pleasing in one part as dark and gloomy and terrible in another. The poisoned chalice, the glittering dagger suspended over the head of the sleeper; wizards and phantoms with hideous masks, those half dim shadows, more terrific than the brightness of flame or the blackness of night; these, and such as these, he had made the companions of his more pleasing pictures. No sooner had the king entered the room than a cold shiver seemed to pass through him, and on Fouquet asking him the cause of it, the king replied, ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... chal—imagines he is right in everything he says and does, and he ought to have perfect liberty to go anywhere or do anything. Some have attempted to paint him white, and in doing so have worked up the blackness from underneath, and presented to us a character which excites a feeling in our notions—a kind of go-between, akin to sympathy and disgust. Not a few have thrown round the Gipsy an enchanting, bewitching halo, which an inspection has ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... man than she had supposed, but otherwise he was like her first impression of him, striking because of his colouring; the red and white of his complexion, which was unusually clear for a man, and the lightness of his grey-green eyes being in peculiar contrast to the blackness of his hair. She noticed again, too, that the expression of his face when he smiled was not altogether agreeable, because his teeth were too far apart; and she also thought his finely-formed hands would have looked better had they not been so ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... himself without any teacher. Until the four rules are learned no teacher can be of any use to him; and that is why "the Masters" are referred to in the way they are. No real masters, whether adepts in power, in love, or in blackness, can affect a man till these ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... knowledge of a certain thing Whereof he had not wist until that hour— To wit, that two contending spirits had power Over his spirit, ruling him with sway Altern; as 'twere dominion now of Day And now of Dark; for one was of the light, And one was of the blackness of the night. ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... was never finished, for at that moment the door of the vehicle was suddenly wrenched open, and with a piercing cry Faynie sprang out into the raging storm and the inky blackness of the night. ...
— Mischievous Maid Faynie • Laura Jean Libbey
... lad's elbow, a threepenny-bit from between another's neck and collar, half a crown from another's hair, and always repeating in that flute-like voice of hers "Well, this is rather queer!" Hither and thither she fared, her neck and arms gleaming white from the luminous blackness of her dress, in the luminous blueness of the night. At a distance, she might have been a wraith; or a breeze made visible; a vagrom breeze, warm and delicate, ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... thwart me in this great revenge; But rather come with large propitious eyes Smiling encouragement with ancient looks! Ye sages whose pale, melancholy orbs Gaze through the darkness of a thousand years, Oh, pierce the solid blackness of to-day, And fire anew this crucible of thought Until my soul flames up to the result! (He ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... which lies beyond all things that men know. And he came to the dark country where there was no sunshine nor spring, but it was always dreary winter; where mountains were piled up like blocks of ice, and where great caverns yawned hungrily in blackness. And this was Jotunheim, the land of ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... or a murderer; she would not have felt any fear if she had been told that her last hour was come. She looked out unceasingly into the darkness, at the waving shadows, at the flitting specks which stood out the more clearly in the blackness of the night, at the rings of changing colour which ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... so like that depicted in the elements about us; a patch of blue here, and a streak of blackness stealing up there to cover it. A glint of gold there and a flurry of smoke almost upon it. So with life: brightness is so closely followed by shadows that gloom and glow become inseparable. Perhaps the contrasts save us from the blinding glare of extremes; it may be well to have even ...
— Dorothy Dale • Margaret Penrose
... months at least since he had died in one of the Grecian islands. The full weeds of a mourning widow would ill have befitted her condition of mind, or her immediate purpose. But yet there was a speciality of blackness in her garments which told him that she had dressed herself with a purpose as of mourning. "Mother," he said to her in the train, "you are in mourning,—as for a friend?" Then when she paused he asked again, "May I not be told for whom it is done? ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... things was not to be borne. It was clear that life, for Canadian Reformers, would very soon be not worth living. They despaired of the future, which, to their depressed vision, seemed to be overhung by a sky of unrelieved blackness. Their despair was accompanied by a smarting sense of defeat and injustice proportionate to the circumstances. Such feelings were not confined to defeated candidates and their immediate friends, but were participated in by Reformers generally. Some of them began to weigh the advantages ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... defend you, I had threatened the life of my father. When, on the morrow, without addressing me a word of reproach, he showed me this letter—this letter, which in every line revealed the blackness of your heart, I could only fall on my knees and ask for pardon. Since that day I have been pursued by unceasing remorse. Soon I left Germany on a long journey; then commenced the penance which I imposed upon myself. It will only finish with ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... earthly size. The starry Universe was vast beyond his conception. And in a second now, that abruptly was altered. He conceived the vehicle as of actuality it was—a globe as large as the ball of Saturn itself! And simultaneously he envisaged the present reality of Saturn. Out in the inky blackness it hung—not a giant ringed world millions of miles away, but only a little ringed ball no bigger than the spaceship—a ringed ball only eight or ten times as big as Lee himself. It hung there for an instant beside them—only a mile or so away perhaps. And as it went past, with both distance and ...
— The World Beyond • Raymond King Cummings
... repair, he left them and went to the window. He stood there for some time, staring at the blackness that represented the wall of ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... were close by and could pierce the gloom, and there at the foot of the cross, beside the cairn of stones that helped to support it, was a little huddled bit of blackness. It moved as they looked, and they knew the voice that came ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... chance. You cannot take a child from a mother in this way. I tell you, if you will only help me I can crawl back up the road that I've traveled. I was not always like this. There was another life, before—before—Oh, since then there have been years of blackness, and hunger, and cold and—worse! But I never dragged the boy into it. Look ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
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