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More "Sombre" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the deep; Petit Bois, Horn Island, Ship Island, Cat Island. Now past Round Island, up Lake Borgne and through the Rigolets they swept into Pontchartrain, and near the day's close saw the tide-low, sombre but blessed shore beyond which a scant half-hour's railway ride lay ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... whom they both knew and liked—being, like De la Noue, cheerful and of good spirits; not deeming it necessary to maintain at all times a stern and grave aspect, or a ruggedness of manner, as well as sombre garments. ...
— Saint Bartholomew's Eve - A Tale of the Huguenot WarS • G. A. Henty
... whose constitution has been violently disturbed, and whose monarchy is situated in the far-off regions of unlimited space. The erratic course of Republican rule is proverbial. There is no stability, no regularity. To-day we may observe its brilliancy, which seems to laugh at and eclipse the sombre shining of more steady and enduring worlds; but ere to-morrow's moon has risen, it may have vanished into the regions of eternal night, and we look for its bright shining light in the councils of the nations, but it has ceased to ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... itself for being out so late, scurries across the dusky sky, screaming angrily. I love the lonely, sullen lake, hidden away in mountain solitudes. I suppose it was my childhood's surroundings that instilled in me this affection for sombre hues. One of my earliest recollections is of a dreary marshland by the sea. By day, the water stood there in wide, shallow pools. But when one looked in the evening they were pools of blood ...
— John Ingerfield and Other Stories • Jerome K. Jerome
... satisfied," said my father, quietly, and he left us staring in that heavy, sombre face before us—a face full of despair, but one to which we could not address ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... below his eyelids. I remember glancing at the lines of him, and thinking what a fine make of a man he was. In his untanned field-boots, breeches, and grey shirt, he looked the born wilderness hunter, though less than two months before he had been driving down to the City every morning in the sombre regimentals of his class. Being a fair man, he was gloriously tanned, and there was a clear line at his shirt-collar to mark the limits of his sunburn. I had first known him years ago, when he was a broker's ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... of that day her uncle ordered the camp to be pitched on a little meadow backed by a sombre forest of spruce. And after the evening meal, in company with Gerald Ainley, she walked towards the timber where an owl was hooting dismally. The air was perfectly still, the sky above crystal clear, and the Northern horizon filled with a golden glow. As they reached the shadow of the ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns
... expedition could proceed further. Several of us went out in different directions, and I happened to strike the right course, which here unexpectedly goes first northward. Accompanied by my dog "Apache," I walked in the fresh morning air through the sombre pine woods, the tops of which basked in glorious sunshine, and along the high cordon, which ran up to a height of 8,900 feet (the highest point reached on my first expedition over the Sierra Madre), until I came to a point where it suddenly terminated. But ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... been put off with the Paris-made gown which the maid at that moment was carefully packing away. The order of nature seemed reversed; the butterfly had abandoned its gorgeous wings of gauze, and was habited in the sombre working garb of the grub. With her hands clasped behind her, the girl paced up and down the room, pouring forth words, two hundred to the minute, and sometimes more. Silently one stenographer, tiptoeing in, replaced another, who as silently departed; and from ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... stream? But Arbaces knew well the means by which to confirm his conquest. From the arts of pleasure he led the young priest at once to those of his mysterious wisdom. He bared to his amazed eyes the initiatory secrets of the sombre philosophy of the Nile—those secrets plucked from the stars, and the wild chemistry, which, in those days, when Reason herself was but the creature of Imagination, might well pass for the lore of a diviner magic. He seemed to the young eyes of the priest as ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... broad brow contracted; his face became as sombre as the skies above them. Some memory of awful bitterness distorted for a moment his features, but he said nothing. Like all strong men, he drove down his emotions to the depths of his heart; thinking perhaps, as simple characters are ...
— Adieu • Honore de Balzac
... wanting any, X. as Clark Russell would say, hung in the wind, and then after a few seconds—seeing that dinner was certainly ready—seated himself. This isolated action rendered him almost as conspicuous as his coat, which was also alone in its sombre glory. Presently others followed the stranger's example, and the meal began. Then ensued a period of disillusion. There was no punkah, the glare of the lamplight was blinding, and the food—all of it—coarse, greasy and cold. The soup which had been waiting was of the variety known as tinned, an ...
— From Jungle to Java - The Trivial Impressions of a Short Excursion to Netherlands India • Arthur Keyser
... "Well—you paint gray and sombre; you see nature being a crape veil; your drawing is heavy, pasty; your composition is a medley of Greuze, who only redeemed his defects by the qualities which ...
— Pierre Grassou • Honore de Balzac
... on Leipziger Strasse, as severe in inner details as in the sombre gray of its outer walls, was hastily constructed in 1871 for the accommodation of the newly consolidated German Empire, and has long been inadequate to the need. A single gallery surrounds three sides of the hall, and is occupied ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton
... scarcely keep back a smile at sight of her incongruous attire. Her gown was a cotton one of a washed out indigo-blue, with large polka spots that had once been white, before the other color had beclouded them. Over this, as if apologizing and condoning, streamed the sombre veil, more suitable for a widow than for that round-faced child. But Lucy drew it about her with a tender touch, as she sat apart, and Camille could plainly note her satisfaction in ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... beneath a brilliant sky, Shaded from brightest gold to softest rose. Then, after supper, back and forth he paced Upon the narrow rock before his cave, Seeking to ease his numbed and stiffened limbs; While evening's sombre shadows slowly crept From plain to hill and highest mountain-top, And solemn silence settled on the world, Save for the night-jar's cry and owl's complaint; While many lights from out the city gleam, And thickening stars spangle the azure vault, Until the moon, with soft and silvery light, Half ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... engagement in grand, tout ensemble style, but there is a sad bon jour look about the thirty-eight cents left in my vest pocket that would make a hired man weep. All day long the heavens wept, and the heavy, sombre clouds went drifting about over head, and the north wind howled in maniacal derision, and the hack drivers danced on the pavements in wild, fierce glee, for they knew too well what the stormy day betokened. The hack was to ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... he learnt deception's art, Hope to conceal and jealousy, False confidence or doubt to impart, Sombre or glad in turn to be, Haughty appear, subservient, Obsequious or indifferent! What languor would his silence show, How full of fire his speech would glow! How artless was the note which spoke Of ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... The smoke still rose sombre and heavy from the roof, and about one of the chimneys little tongues of flame leaped up as she approached. She could hear a fierce crackling, too, of that spiteful sort made by the burning of dry wood. The house was all of wood, and old, and it ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... faint light of evening flickered through a window painted in sombre colours commemorating the achievements of Satan upon Earth. High up in the wall the window stood, and the streaming lights of candles lower ...
— The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories • Lord Dunsany
... of Ireland is depressing, but it is very beautiful; at least if your taste includes an appreciation of what is wild, magnificent, and sombre. Oppressed you must be, even if you are an artist, by its bleakness and its dreariness, its lonely lakes reflecting a dull, grey sky, its desolate boglands, its solitary chapels, its wretched cabins perched on hillsides that ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... to a large margin, but the duodecimo, it seems to me, is much the best size and shape of volume for the proper display upon a printed page of this miniature poem, and a handsome old-style or Elzevir letter is the fittest type, instead of the sombre modern cut, ...
— The Writer, Volume VI, April 1892. - A Monthly Magazine to Interest and Help All Literary Workers • Various
... of all three, the girl answered in English; not the English of a French jeune fille, instructed by an imported "Miss," but the English of an Englishwoman, pure and sweet, though the voice was sad and lifeless. Her melancholy dark eyes, deep and sombre as mountain tarns, wandered from the brother's handsome face to the beautiful one ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... The sombre woods are richly sad, Their leaves are red and gold: Are thoughts in solemn splendour clad Signs that ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... done. Then he recalled with some sense of it as being rather ridiculous his adventure with Henry Grey. In a far distant day he would tell Ann. As he halted at the foot of the steps, he thought of his only interview with Lincoln. The tall figure with the sombre face left in his memory that haunting sense of the unusual of which others had spoken and which was apt to ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... baker's boy who was on his way to Hutton with a heavy basket of bread and cakes. Hutton, which is somewhat of a model village for the retainers attached to Hutton Hall, stands in a lovely hollow at the edge of the moors. The steep hills are richly clothed with sombre woods, and the peace and seclusion reigning there is in marked contrast to the bleak wastes above. When I climbed the steep road on that autumn afternoon, and, passing the zone of tall, withered bracken, reached the open moorland, I seemed to have come out merely ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home
... and a half of Pritchard's Hill, sinks into the plain three miles south-west of Kernstown. Some distance beyond this ridge, and separated from it by the narrow valley of the Opequon, rise the towering bluffs of the North Mountain, the western boundary of the Valley, sombre with forest ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... an aspect of the most profound gravity— the reflection, as it were, of the sombre countenance of the austere and relentless Grand Master. The lower part of the hall was filled with guards and others whom curiosity had drawn together to witness the ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... in a kindly way, and took her hand, very cold and lax, in his for welcome. She could not answer, but made haste to follow Veronica to her room, whither the old woman led the way with a candle. It was a gloomily spacious chamber, with sombre walls and a lofty ceiling with a faded splendor of gilded paneling. Some tall, old-fashioned mirrors and bureaus stood about, with rugs before them on the stone floor; in the middle of the room was a bed curtained with mosquito-netting. Carved chairs were pushed here and there ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... it was quite dark. The silence and freshness of the night, the occasional sharp cry of the wood-hen, the ruddy glow of the fire, the subdued rushing of the river, the sombre forest, and the immediate foreground of our saddles packs and blankets, made a picture worthy of a Salvator Rosa or a Nicolas Poussin. I call it to mind and delight in it now, but I did not notice it at the time. We next to never know when we are well off: but this ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... the Doctor flashed down the corridor, and in the lecture-theatre there was such a rustling of silk gowns and waving of feather bonnets, and gleaming of white collars and sparkling patent-leather boots, as must have fairly astonished that sombre place. Every one was there—every fellow nearly had got a mother or somebody to show off to. Even Bramble turned up with a magnificent grandmother, greatly to the envy of friend and foe, and would have been the proudest Tadpole alive if the dear good old lady had not ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... purchase of Alaska, and was abandoned in 1872, reoccupied by the military in 1875, and finally abandoned and sold to private parties in 1877. In the fort and about it there were a few good, clean homes, which shone all the more brightly in their sombre surroundings. The ground occupied by the fort, by being carefully leveled and drained, was dry, though formerly a portion of the general swamp, showing how easily the whole town could have been improved. But in spite of disorder and squalor, shaded with clouds, washed and wiped by rain and sea ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... a rather surprising summons to perform his priestly functions. The summoner was Rebecca Mary. She appeared like a sombre little shadow in his sunny sermon room. The minister's wife ushered her in, and in the brief instant of opening the door and announcing her name flashed him a warning glance. He had been acquainted so long with her glances that he was able to interpret ...
— Rebecca Mary • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... the tumbler to his lips and drank before replying, and as he did so his customary grave composure became apparent, making Tommy wonder if his senses had tricked him. He looked at the lad with sombre eyes as he set down the glass. His brother's letter was ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... holding a handkerchief to his face, to avoid breathing the pestilential effluvia, Leonard saw that there were other coffins in the cart, and that it was followed by two persons in long black cloaks. The vehicle itself, fashioned like an open hearse, and of the same sombre colour, relieved by fantastical designs, painted in white, emblematic of the pestilence, was drawn by a horse of the large black Flanders breed, and decorated with funeral trappings. To Leonard's inexpressible horror, the cart again stopped opposite him, and the driver ringing his bell, ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... exclaimed, "Dr. Trip ain't in it." But the surgeon's face wore a preoccupied, sombre look, irresponsive to the nurse's admiration. While she helped the interne with the complicated dressing, the little nurse made ready for removal to the ward. Then when one of the ward tenders had wheeled the muffled figure into ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... abruptly, and leaning his head on his folded arms burst into tears. He wept for a long time. The dusk had deepened in the room. Razumov, motionless in sombre wonder, listened to ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... and most beautifully wooded part of Strathearn—the valley interspersed in the most picturesque fashion, with knolls richly clad with larch, oak, or hazel; while here and there the gleam of the River Earn betrays her course, where she has emerged from sombre wood, or deep and rocky gorge. In spring-time the eye is delighted and refreshed with the varieties of green—from the deep and sombre shade of the Scotch pine and the almost yellow and brown of the young ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... in the hall without struck midnight, but Mr. Ravenslee sat there long after the silvery chime had died away, his chin sunk upon his broad chest, his sombre eyes staring blindly at the fading embers, lost in profound and gloomy meditation. But, all at once, he started and glanced swiftly around toward a certain window, the curtains of which were only partly drawn, and his lounging attitude changed instantly ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... wet and weary hoof through peat-hogs, over rocks, and along stupid and fatiguing acclivities, rugged with heather. Oh, preserve me from Deer-stalking; it is a sport of which I cherish only the most sombre memories. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, May 14, 1892 • Various
... We now emerge from the poetry that belongs to early Greece, through the mists of which the forms of men assume proportions as gigantic as indistinct. The enchanting Herodotus abandons us, and we do not yet permanently acquire, in the stead of his romantic and wild fidelity, the elaborate and sombre statesmanship of the calm Thucydides. Henceforth we see more of the beautiful and the wise, less of the wonderful and vast. What the heroic age is to tradition, the Persian invasion is ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a man of forty-six, and a tale writer of some twenty-four years' standing, when "The Scarlet Letter" appeared. He was born at Salem, Mass., on July 4th, 1804, son of a sea-captain. He led there a shy and rather sombre life; of few artistic encouragements, yet not wholly uncongenial, his moody, intensely meditative temperament being considered. Its colours and shadows are marvelously reflected in his "Twice-Told Tales" and other short stories, the product of his first ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... I gradually fell into a somewhat sombre reverie, in the course of which I reviewed the events that had befallen me during the short period that had elapsed since the Dolphin and the Eros had parted company. I went over again, in memory, ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... cypress "knees." Unwittingly, you are sure to gather on your clothing a colony of ravenous ticks from some swaying branch. Redbugs bent on mischief scramble up on you by the score and bury themselves in your skin, while a cloud of mosquitoes waves behind you like a veil. In the sombre shadows through which you move you have a feeling that there are many unseen things that crawl and glide and fly, and a creepy feeling about the edges of your scalp becomes a familiar sensation. Once we came upon the trail of a bear and found the going easier when we waded on hands and knees through ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... imagination. There is a new screen prefixed to the choir, so airy and harmonious, that I concluded it Wyat's; but it is by a Windsor architect, whose name I forget. Jarvis's window, over the altar, after West, is rather too sombre for the Resurrection, though it accords with the tone of the choirs; but the Christ is a poor figure, scrambling to heaven in a fright, as if in dread of being again buried alive. and not ascending calmly in secure dignity: and there is a Judass below, T so gigantic, ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... material prevented the sound of my own footfalls, as I paced backward and forward, from breaking the current of my thought. Along the cornices ran gold rods, from which depended six pictures, all of the sombre and imaginative caste, which ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Germans cannot be too highly valued or too highly honoured. People guarded themselves against him as against an illness,—not with arguments—it is impossible to refute an illness,—but with obstruction, with mistrust, with repugnance, with loathing, with sombre earnestness, as though he were a great rampant danger. The aesthetes gave themselves away when out of three schools of German philosophy they waged an absurd war against Wagner's principles with "ifs" and "fors"—what ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... her death-sleep: some forward sun-rays broke through the clouds of this sombre sky of Scotland; the snow melted, the lake broke its ice-crust, the first buds opened, the green turf reappeared; everything came out of its prison at the joyous approach of spring, and it was a great grief to ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... without doubt a British officer. He was dressed, however, as a civilian. His hat showed that he was in mourning; and a general sadness of demeanor which he manifested was well in keeping with that sombre emblem. ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... rose to his feet, and his young slenderness was full of strength and dignity, and his face, cleared of its sombre brooding, was full of a bright, untroubled decision. The cypresses upon the hilltops stood no more resolutely erect, the hills themselves were no more steadfast. "Nay," he said, laughing a little, boyishly, in pure pleasure at the crystal fixity ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... columns that load its front, the low Asiatic domes which rest upon its walls in the repose of a thousand years, the rude and gaudy mosaics, and above all the captured horses of Corinth which start from out the sombre mass in the glory of Grecian art, received from the solemn and appropriate light, a character of melancholy and mystery, that well comported with the thick recollections which crowd the mind as the eye gazes at this rare relic ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... description. In return, they granted him all the land stretching from the Merri Creek to Geelong. Batman had the documents drawn up, and on the Northcote Hill, overlooking the grass-covered flats of Collingwood and the sombre forests of Carlton and Fitzroy, the natives affixed their marks to the deeds, by which Batman fancied he was legally put in possession of 600,000 acres. Trees were cut with notches, in order to fix the boundaries, and in the afternoon ...
— History of Australia and New Zealand - From 1606 to 1890 • Alexander Sutherland
... marketable commodities, on mules and donkeys. It was not difficult for him to distinguish between the races, for Rais Ali had already told him that none but Turks were permitted to wear the turban, not even the sons of Turks by Algerine mothers, and that the Jews were by law commanded to dress in sombre black. ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne
... the youth, father," said the girl; and having said this, she crossed the room and took a seat by the side of the fire. The man, or we should rather say gentleman—for he had the appearance of one, notwithstanding the sombre and peculiar dress he wore, continued to read a letter which he had just opened; and Edward, who feared himself the prisoner of a Roundhead when he only expected to meet a keeper, was further irritated by the neglect shown towards him by the party. Forgetting that ...
— The Children of the New Forest • Captain Marryat
... was clear though cold, he threw His chamber door wide open[779]—and went forth Into a gallery of a sombre hue, Long, furnished with old pictures of great worth, Of knights and dames heroic and chaste too, As doubtless should be people of high birth; But by dim lights the portraits of the dead Have something ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... whom we cannot but love as our benefactor, whom we cannot but admire as our superior: it was a sense of frightful anomaly, of putrescence in beauty and splendour, of death in life and life in death, which made the English psychologist-poets savage and sombre, cynical and wrathful and hopeless. The influence is the same on all, and the difference of attitude is slight, and due to individual characters; but the gloom is the same in each of them. In Webster—no mere grisly inventor of Radcliffian horrors, as we are apt ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... altitude, men and women become too lifeless for much enterprise. There is no society. There are a few Germans and a few Englishmen in the place, who see each other on matters of business during the day; but, sombre as life generally is, they seem to care little for each other's company on any other footing. I know not to what point the aspirations of the Germans may stretch themselves, but to the English the one idea that gives salt to life is ...
— Returning Home • Anthony Trollope
... Across the sloping, unkept lawn, about midway between the house and the whitewashed gate leading from the yard, a rabbit hops, aimlessly, his back humped up, and his white tail showing plainly amid his sombre surroundings. I can see the muscles about his nostrils twitching, as he stops now and again to nibble at a withered tuft of grass. A lonely jay flits from one tree to another; a cardinal speeds by my window, a line ...
— The Love Story of Abner Stone • Edwin Carlile Litsey
... more than common during this interview, but it is certain she did not smile less; and the earl, Lady Marian assured Sir Edward, was so very different a creature from what he had recently been, that she could hardly think it was the same sombre gentleman with whom she had passed the last few ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... education, and influence; and the non-slaveholders are as virtually the subject class, since slavery, being the great, paramount, leading interest, overtopping and overshadowing all things else, tinging every other social element with its own sombre hue, is fatal to any movement adverse to it on the part of the non-slaveholder. Everything must drift in the whirl of its powerful eddy, a terrible maelstrom, into which the North was fast floating, when the thunder of the Fort Sumter ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol III, Issue VI, June, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... serve merely to illustrate the lighter moments that stand out in relief against the more sombre background of the strenuous years, for, of all the absorbingly busy periods of Edison's inventive life, the first five years of the storage-battery era was one of the very busiest of them all. It was not that there remained any basic ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... paling of cheek, she was saying aloud, in a tone cold as ice, "And indeed, most excellent Gabinius, you must pardon me for being startled; for all that I know of you tells me that you are likely to find a sombre Vestal sorry ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... remarked, it probably is that such birds are generally of a shy disposition, as if conscious that their beauty was a source of danger, and are much more difficult to discover or approach, than the sombre coloured and comparatively tame females or than the young and as yet unadorned males. (93. On the Cosmetornis, see Livingstone's 'Expedition to the Zambesi,' 1865, p. 66. On the Argus pheasant, Jardine's 'Nat. Hist. Lib.: Birds,' vol. xiv. p. 167. On Birds ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... on the breast of the lofty mountain, the captain could scan many an acre of sombre pine forest with pleasant little parks interspersed, and here and there long slopes brown with bunch grass. He was the lord of this wild domain. And yet his sway there was not undisputed. Behind an intervening spur to the westward ran an old Indian trail long ...
— Our Boys - Entertaining Stories by Popular Authors • Various
... is a bird of somewhat sombre plumage. Its total length is only five inches, and of this half is composed of tail. The head is ashy grey, the back and wings are greenish; the lower plumage is bright yellow, but this is not conspicuous except when the bird is on the wing. This flycatcher has a loud song, which may be syllabised: ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... Gently and noiselessly they glide, gilding the glossy old chairs, polished by years of care; fluttering with flickering gleam on the bookcases, by the fire, and the antique China vases on the mantel, and even coqueting with sparkles of fanciful gayety over the face of the perpendicular, sombre old clock, which, though at times apparently coaxed almost to the verge of a smile, still continued its inevitable tick, ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... voice, the smallest with its golden chimes, seem to be chanting it when they ring. Each swinging tongue has its tale to tell, a tale of old Spain, of Spanish galleons and Spanish gentlemen adventurers, of gentle-voiced priests and sombre-eyed Indians, of conquest, revolt, intrigue, and sudden death. When a baby is born in San Juan, a rarer occurrence than a strong man's death, the littlest of the bells upon the western arch laughs while it calls to all to hearken; when a man is killed, the angry-toned ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... a small sombre room within, with a bare yellow-washed floor and ragged curtains at the little window. In a corner was a diminutive altar draped with threadbare lace. The red glow of the taper lighted a cheap print of St. Joseph and ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... these secret motives, the tour was projected as a scheme of amusement, and the details were discussed between Charles and Rashe with great animation, making the soberness of Hiltonbury appear both tedious and sombre, though all the time Lucy felt that there she should again meet that which her heart both feared and yearned for, and without which these pleasures would be but shadows of enjoyment. Yet that they were not including her in their party, gave her a sense of angry neglect and impatience. ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... church on Easter morning. So Gething knew the tail of the deluge was reached and past. He had the street almost to himself. It was noticeable that the man had not once called an acquaintance by name or made the first remark. His answers had been as reflex as his walking. Geth was thinking, and in the sombre eyes was the dumb look of a pain that would not be told—perhaps ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... the ancient chateau of La Pauline, perched half-way up the mountain on a table-land—its grey stone face showing grimly against a sombre background of cypress trees. The house was built, as the antiquarians of Draguignan avow, of stone that was hewn by the Romans for less peaceful purposes. That an ancient building must have stood here would, indeed, be to some extent credible, from the fact that in front of the house lies ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... would revive and flourish. A longing for the brightness and silence of fallen snow seizes him at such times. He is homesick for the hale rough weather; for the tracery of the frost upon his window- panes at morning, the reluctant descent of the first flakes, and the white roofs relieved against the sombre sky. And yet the stuff of which these yearnings are made, is of the flimsiest: if but the thermometer fall a little below its ordinary Mediterranean level, or a wind come down from the snow-clad Alps behind, the spirit of his ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... man's family had quilted their duty and affection into it in the shape of patches upon patches, rose-color, crimson, blue, violet, and green, and then (as their hopes faded, and their life kept growing shadier, and their attire took a sombre hue) sober gray and great fragments of funereal black, until the Doctor could revive the memory of most things that had befallen him by looking at his patchwork-gown, as it hung upon a chair. And now it was ragged again, and all the fingers ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... were as interested and as gracious. There was Pete, tall and very black, and very grave, as Darry was also. There was Jem, full of life and waggishness, and bright for any exercise of his wits; and grave shadows used to come over his changeable face often enough too. There was Margaret, with her sombre beauty; and old Theresa with her worn old face. I think there was a certain indescribable reserve of gravity upon them all, but there was not one whose lips did not part in a white line when looking at me, nor whose eyes and ears did not watch me with an interest as benign as it was ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... The sombre reflections induced by the thought of my father's disappointment did not, I confess with shame, last long. They vanished as a morning mist is dissipated before the rising sun, when I recalled to mind that I was not only ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... Bataille de Maldon pour le Roland, on a l'impression de sortir d'un lieu sombre pour entrer dans la lumiere. Cette impression vous vient de tous les cotes a la fois, des lieux decrits, des sujets, de la maniere de raconter, de l'esprit qui anime, de l'intelligence qui ordonne, mais, d'une facon encore plus immediate et plus diffuse, ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... found him. He stood silent at the foot of the tree looking across the chamber at his enemy. Did no feeling of compassion disturb his sombre breast? The man was not wholly evil; he loved flowers (I have been told) and sweet music (he was himself no mean performer on the harpsichord); and, let it be frankly admitted, the idyllic nature of the scene stirred ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... Bonaparte, civic sentiments had yielded place to the military spirit and to boundless pride in the nation's glory. Whenever republican feelings were outraged, there were sufficient distractions to dissipate any of the sombre broodings which Bonaparte so heartily disliked; and an event of international importance now came to still the voice of ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... whites would be to the back of the Negro passengers. The porter therefore changed his seat, going forward and taking a position where he would be facing any one coming from the coach for whites. He raised the window by which he sat and his eye wandered out into the darkness amid the sombre trees that went speeding along, and there arose to haunt him mental visions of a sea of angry white faces closing around some one dark face, perhaps guilty and perhaps innocent; and as he thought thereon he shuddered. ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... like him." Not love, she thought, but liking! She liked being with him. She liked the sensation of putting confidence in him. She liked his youth, and her own. She was sorry because he had a cold and was not taking care of it.... Now they were climbing a sombre creaking staircase towards a new and remote world that was separated from the common world just quitted by the adventurous passage of the rainy yard.... And now they were amid oily odours in a large ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... of the last act is exceedingly beautiful. No painter could reproduce on canvas the sublime scenery sketched in its prologue; more gloomy than the pictures of Ruysdael, more sombre than those of Salvator Rosa. Before describing the inundation of the masses, our author naturally recalls the traditions of the Flood. The nobles, the representatives of the Past, with their few surviving adherents, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... Range and it falls off abruptly into the deepest portion of the Lake. The result is a marvelous shading off of the water from a rich sapphire to a deep purple, while the shore on either side varies from a bright sparkling blue to a blue so deep and rich as almost to be sombre. Well, indeed, might Lake Tahoe be named "the Lake of ineffable blue." Here are shades and gradations that to reproduce in textile fabrics would have pricked a king's ambition, and made the dyers of the Tyrian purple of old turn green with envy. ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... visitors bringing news—great news and glorious. A big naval battle had been fought in the North Sea! Ten British battleships had been sunk, but the whole German fleet had been destroyed! For the first time war took on some colour. Crimson and purple and gold began to shoot through the sombre black and grey. A completely new set of emotions filled their hearts, a new sense of exultation, a new pride in that great British Navy which hitherto had been a mere word in a history book, or in a song. The children who, after their manner, were quickest ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... the close of the war, as the book may be considered too long already. It only remains for me now to get all my people happy as soon as possible. Zany and Chunk 'make up,' and a good deal of their characteristic love-making will be worked in to relieve the rather sombre state of things at this stage. Whately returns with his empty sleeve, more of a hero than ever in his own eyes and his mother's. Miss Lou thinks him strangely thoughtful and considerate in keeping away, as he does, after a few short visits at The Oaks. The truth is, ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... seemed to have served no other purpose than to assemble the whole male population of Permatang Pasir on the shore—a sombre-faced throng, with an aloofness of manner and expression far from pleasing. The thatched piers were crowded with turbaned Mussulmen in their bajus or short jackets, full white trousers, and red sarongs or plaitless kilts—the boys dressed in silver fig-leaves ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... heralding spring, to which rude winter will reluctantly yield place. In snug corners, among the rocks, the great spurge of our district, the characias of the Greeks, the jusclo of the Provencals, begins to lift its drooping inflorescence and discreetly opens a few sombre flowers. Here the first Midges of the year will come to slake their thirst. By the time that the tip of the stalks reaches the perpendicular, the worst of the cold weather will ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... Princesses, Les Aveugles, etc., are not people of past times as are the heroes in Shakespeare. They are merely souls lost in the clouds, threatened by them with death, eternally menaced by some invisible and sombre power. ...
— Concerning the Spiritual in Art • Wassily Kandinsky
... upon the interior of which the upholsterer and the cabinet-maker have exhausted the resources of their trades. The word "subdued" describes the effect at which those artists have aimed. The woods employed are costly and rich, but usually of a sombre hue, and, though elaborately carved, are frequently unpolished. The light which comes through the stained windows, or through the small diamond panes, is of that description which is eminently the "dim, religious." Every part of the floor is thickly carpeted. The pews differ ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... flowing white of his locks and beard, as with the supernumerary taper he prepared to light the wax candles in the nine-branched candlestick of silver. He wore a long, hooded mantle reaching to the feet, and showing where it fell back in front a brown gaberdine clasped by a girdle. These sombre-colored robes were second-hand, as the austere simplicity of the Pragmatic required. The Jewish Council of Sixty did not permit its subjects to ruffle it like the Romans of those days of purple pageantry. The young bloods, forbidden ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... second work to be mentioned is his "Defence of Poesie." Amid the gayety and splendor of that reign, there was a sombre element. The Puritans took gloomy views of life: they accounted amusements, dress, and splendor as things of the world; and would even sweep away poetry as idle, and even wicked. Sir Philip came to its defence with the spirit ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... the branches alarmed my sombre little friend (I knew that the nest was tenanted, as the bill and head were distinctly visible through the lateral entrance), and out she darted with such a 'whir' that anything like satisfactory identification ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... given many hours of pleasure to one who finds in such sombre elegies of the dead most interesting ...
— Quaint Epitaphs • Various
... of sombre glare With yellow tinged the forest's brown; Up rose the Wildgrave's bristling hair, And horror chill'd ...
— The Children's Garland from the Best Poets • Various
... went up that strange, black road of tragic artifice, he stopped, startled, thinking he heard steps in front of him. He could see nothing in front but the twin sombre walls of pine and the wedge of starlit sky above them. At first he thought he must have fancied it or been mocked by a mere echo of his own tramp. But as he went on he was more and more inclined to conclude, with the remains of his reason, ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... most honest woman in the world, but I've nevertheless done for you what was necessary." And then as her now quite sombre gravity only made him stare: "To start you it was necessary. From me it has the weight." He but continued to stare, and she met his blankness with surprise. "Don't you understand me? I've told the proper lie for you." Still he only ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... the water, gradually increasing her speed. I was eagerly looking out for the coast; at length it came in sight—its distant outline rendered indistinct by the misty pall which hung over it. As we drew nearer, its forest covered heights had a particularly gloomy and sombre appearance, which made me think of the cruelties I had heard were practised on those shores, of the barbarous slave trade, of the fearful idolatries of its dark-skinned children, of its wild beasts, and of its deadly fevers. There was nothing exhilarating, nothing to ...
— The African Trader - The Adventures of Harry Bayford • W. H. G. Kingston
... from the same primitive Indo-European root come the Latin words dies (day), deus or divus (god); the dark sombre vault of heaven is Varuna, the Greek [Greek: ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... the conceit. Barren, black, and desolate, the great moor gripped the imagination as no smiling landscape of field and forest could—does yet, where enough of it remains. Far as eye reaches the dun heather covers hill and plain with its sombre pall. Like gloomy sentinels, furry cattails nod in the bog where the blue gentian peeps timidly into murky pools; the only human habitation in sight some heath boer's ling-thatched hut, flanked by rows of peat stacks in vain endeavor to stay the sweep of the pitiless ...
— Hero Tales of the Far North • Jacob A. Riis
... officers passing back and forth talking and gesticulating. A dozen troopers under a flag of truce came forward to pick up the wounded, and without even challenging we permitted them to do their work. The house remained quiet, sombre, silent, nothing showing but the dark barrels of our carbines. The infantry battalion at the gate moved against the left of the cavalry, and couriers were despatched to hurry up more. Out by the negro quarters a dozen officers held council, pointing at the house, and by gestures ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... walking down the nave, preceded by the sombre figures with the pot flowers, who were just visible in the rays that reached them through the distant choir screen at their back; while above the grey night sky and stars looked in upon them through the ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... reflections into a thousand fragments. Evening comes on; the sun declines, and the face of the tower is dark against the glittering beams; the water receives the glow and reflects the radiance. Tower, spires, trees and landscape assume one sombre hue; clear cut against the sky their forms appear; and, as night falls, the single deep-toned bell rings out the "Curfew" across ...
— Evesham • Edmund H. New
... dark—according to the hours, seasons, and meteorological conditions, my son. And it's some joint, believe me, with the dark old mahogany trim and furniture and the dull rich effects in azure and gold; and the Beluch carpets full of sombre purple and dusky fire, and the white cat on the window-sill watching you put of its sapphire ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... a sombre dining-room with decanters and glasses, bedrooms with satin down quilts spread over the foot of the bed, and adjoining one of them a dressing-room with pomades and perfumes and rows of boots just as its owner had ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... tall and angular, with a certain nobility and haughtiness of carriage inherited from her fisherman father. Her sallow skin, sombre grey eyes and heavy mouth, looked the personification of night beside the sunny beauty of Blaisette's blue eyes and yellow hair. The girl of the cottage was an excellent foil to the girl of Colomberie ...
— Where Deep Seas Moan • E. Gallienne-Robin
... water-cure. And between the two there is a constant battle as to which shall be the town. For the rest, there is a road wandering in an aimless way along the hill-side, like a child at play who is going nowhere, and all along this road are scattered every variety of dwelling, big and little, sombre and gay, humble and pretentious, which the mind of man ever conceived of,—and some of which I devoutly trust the mind of man will never again conceive. There are solid substantial Dutch farm-houses, built of unhewn ...
— Laicus - The experiences of a Layman in a Country Parish • Lyman Abbott
... first of the Moghuls to reside in the Mahomedan atmosphere of Delhi throughout his long reign. But, begun in usurpation at the cost of his own father, it ended in misery and gloom. His sons had revolted against him, his sombre fanaticism had estranged from him the Rajput princes of whom Akbar had made the pillars of the Moghul throne, and though he had reduced to subjection the last of the independent Mahomedan kingdoms of India, he had exhausted his ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... the eyes of the confederates was the city of Mons, which they resolved to besiege with all possible expedition. They passed the Schelde on the third day of September, and detached the prince of Hesse to attack the French lines from the Haisne to the Sombre, which were abandoned at his approach. On the seventh day of September, mareschal de Boufflers arrived in the French camp at Quievrain, content to act in an inferior capacity to Villars, although his superior in point of seniority. The ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... now closed, and the growing darkness gave to the broad, still, and deep expanse of the brimful river, first a hue sombre and uniform—then a dismal and turbid appearance, partially lighted by a waning and pallid moon. The massive and ancient bridge which stretches across the Clyde was now but dimly visible, and resembled that which Mirza, in his unequalled vision, has described as ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Roseate or sombre your humour as you patrol the reefs, it is liable to be changed in a flash into clashing tints by inadvertent contact with a warty ghoul of a sea-urchin, a single one of whose agonising spines never fails to bring you face to face with one of the vividest realities ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... I must shpake a pace, I tried to kape a cheerful face, Though obvious lack of matther I was mournin'! But, oh sombre-faced JOHN MORLEY! Ye desired to help me surely, When ye went for Tipperary widout warnin'! Though your tale could scarce be boulder, Yet my hits straight from the shoulder Will make ye mourn the hour that ye were born in. And I think ye'll have a notion Ye were wrong to cross the ocean, And raise ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Nov. 1, 1890 • Various
... or temporary. A man brings his peculiar habits of thought and feeling to the contemplation of objects, and the aesthetic impression produced is coloured by these predispositions. Thus, a person of a sad and gloomy cast of mind will be disposed to see a sombre beauty where other eyes see nothing of the kind. And then there are all the effects of temporary conditions of the imagination and the feelings. Thus, the individual mind may be focussed in a certain way through the suggestion of another. People not seldom see ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... wish, on the tables and sofas she knew. But the pictures in Kew Palace were not all Queen Charlotte's; they are catalogued to-day, and so are many manuscripts and autograph letters of royal persons which attract careful readers. From remarks which can be overheard in those sombre rooms, many visitors, I think, imagine the paintings of still life, of flowers in vases, odd representations of game and fruit, and so forth, to have been selected and hung in the house as specially suitable for public gardens. The portraits of royal gentlemen in blue and red puzzle them; ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... her head, scan the sea and the forest and the hills, and peer into her son's face. And as she did so, even the mist begotten of tears of suffering could not dim the wonderful brilliancy and clearness of her eyes. For with the sombre fire of inexhaustible ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... contagious wrath of Buskin and of Sock Hath abated for awhile, And no more the Emerald Isle On the stage and in the green-room seems to shock. The curtain is rung down, The comedian and the clown, With the sombre putter-on of tragic airs, Are gone, with all the cast, And the Theatre, at last, Is "Closed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, July 9, 1892 • Various
... he had recovered from his sombre reverie all the noise, all the splendor, had passed away. At the angle of the street there remained nothing beneath the stranger but a few hoarse, discordant voices, shouting at intervals, ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... night was clear though cold, he threw His chamber door wide open—and went forth Into a gallery, of a sombre hue, Long, furnish'd with old pictures of great worth, Of knights and dames heroic and chaste too, As doubtless should be people of high birth. But by dim lights the portraits of the dead Have something ghastly, desolate, ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... are clogged to all sweet sounds save thine own voice, and mine eyes blinded to all sights but thee, else had I heard that nightingale, and seen the golden-vestured morning sun itself steal from its sombre east before its time for jealousy that ...
— Vera - or, The Nihilists • Oscar Wilde
... had passed from the Market Square to the Esplanade, overhanging the Lower Town, and which commands a view almost matchless for extent and varied beauty. At this hour the shades of evening were settling down, and tinging with sombre hues the colouring of the landscape: over the western edge the sun had sunk; far below, the noble river lay in black shadow and a single gleaming band of dying daylight, as it crept along ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... it has been apprehended, is warmly taken up, and cherished. Evidently the question, with regard to execution, here is: how can this phenomenon (the new Allegro theme) be made to arise naturally from the sad and sombre close of the Adagio, so that its abrupt appearance shall prove attractive rather than repellant? Very appropriately, the new theme first appears like a delicate, hardly distinguishable dream, in unbroken pp, and is then lost in a melting ritardando; thereafter, by means of a crescendo, ...
— On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): - A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music • Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)
... Life and one of Death, Passed o'er our village as the morning broke; The dawn was on their faces, and beneath, The sombre houses hearsed ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... made no reply, for Braddyll's allusion conjured up a sombre train of thought within his breast, awakening apprehensions which he could neither account for, nor shake off. Meanwhile, the cavalcade slowly approached the north-east gateway of the abbey—passing through crowds of kneeling and sorrowing ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... and descriptive. "Armageddon!" Stolid, unimaginative people went about saying it to each other. The sound of the word thrilled them, intoxicated them, gave them an awful feeling that was at the same time, in some odd way, agreeable; it stirred them with a solemn and sombre passion. They said "Armageddon. It means Armageddon." Yet nobody knew and nobody asked or thought ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... anxious care, and when the fitful sleep slid over him, she sat motionless with folded hands, and gazed through the window. All was still, sombre, chill, and dreary. The wind had slackened; the river ran smoother. In a field across the valley a woman was picking potatoes. No other human ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... overshadowing rocks and down sudden steeps the road kept its irregular course; and now it would cleave its way along a mile of table-land, elevated above a perfect ocean of trees on either side, which seemed as though human hand or foot had never trespassed on their sombre solitude. Yet, every here and there the marks of destruction would suggest thoughts of man's work and presence. Whole tracts of forest would be filled with half-charred trunks, the centres black and hollowed out, the upper parts ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... He and the sombre, silent Spirit met— They knew each other both for good and ill; Such was their power, that neither could forget His former friend and future foe; but still There was a high, immortal, proud regret In either's eye, as if 'twere less their will Than destiny to ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... inarticulate cry—"Make your game.... The game is made.... Bets are closed." The croupier spread out the cards, and seemed to wish luck to the newcomer, indifferent as he was to the losses or gains of those who took part in these sombre pleasures. Every bystander thought he saw a drama, the closing scene of a noble life, in the fortunes of that bit of gold; and eagerly fixed his eyes on the prophetic cards; but however closely they watched the young ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... along the wooded slope of the hill. Here and there granite boulders, bare and blasted, broke through the grey verdure of the dwarf oaks, and the sombre purple mountain with its bluish ravines formed an impassable barrier about ...
— Honey-Bee - 1911 • Anatole France
... this great altitude, loses the sun-god's touch and strikes upon the cheek keen as the ether of the limitless heavens. A while ago, only in the distant valley winding to the south could foliage be seen. Now, all in those depths is merged in sombre shade, and not a leaf or tree breaks for miles the grand monotony. Close at hand a host of tiny mounds, each tipped with reddish gold, and some few further ornamented by miniature sentry, alert and keen-eyed, tell of a prairie township already ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... storm? The Spectacle of Pleasure, the parade of clothes, estates, motor-cars, luxury and vanity in the sight of the workers is the culminating irritant of Labour. So long as that goes on, this sombre resolve to which we are all awakening, this sombre resolve rather to wreck the whole fabric than to continue patiently at work, will gather strength. It does not matter that such a resolve is hopeless and unseasonable; we are dealing here with the profounder ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... was very sombre and reserved," says Peytel; "he refused to call me in the morning, to carry my money-chest to my room, to cover the open car when it rained." The Prosecutor disproves this by stating that Rey talked with the inn maids and servants, asked if his master was ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... cable's length, on one of the quarters of the Montauk, was a ship careering before the gale like themselves, though carrying more canvas, and consequently driving faster through the water. The sudden appearance of this vessel in the sombre light of the morning, when objects were seen distinctly but without the glare of day; the dark hull, relieved by a single narrow line of white paint, dotted with ports; the glossy hammock-cloths, and all those other coverings of dark ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... reinstate in strength and ripe dignity a volume which he would have taken to pieces, and redressed like an age-worn woman in a fashionable gown. So far did his son's superior taste work upon his, that at length, if he opened a new binding, however sombre, and saw a time-browned paper and old type within, the sight would give him ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... the eaves and roofs, spread out more freely in the little Piazza del Ayuntamiento, bringing out of the shadows the ugly front of the Archbishop's Palace, and the towers of the municipal buildings capped with black slate, a sombre erection of the ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... of creeping-plants and the interlaced branches which years of neglect had allowed to cover it almost entirely; while the thick, luxuriant branches of the bread-fruit and other trees spread above it, and flung a deep, sombre shadow over the spot, as if to guard it from the heat and the light of day. We conversed long and in whispers about this strange habitation ere we ventured to approach it; and when at length we did so it was, at least on my part, with ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... Sylvia's, also I had seen pictures of him in the newspapers, and had studied them with some care, trying to imagine what sort of personage he might be. I knew that he was twenty-four, but the man who came towards us I would have taken to be forty. His face was sombre, with large features and strongly marked lines about the mouth; he was tall and thin, and moved with decision, betraying no emotion even in this moment of surprise. "What are you doing here?" were his first ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... though small and insignificant in itself, has a pleasing appearance, as it rushes over the rocks, and through the trees and shrubs. This mountain is thickly clothed with wood, which in many places not only excludes the rays of the sun, but produces a sombre, gloomy appearance; this, with the occasional plaintive coo of the mountain dove, (the only sound heard at this height,) creates in the mind sensations of pleasing melancholy. In some parts an open space ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 363, Saturday, March 28, 1829 • Various
... half awake. It was Stefan's sudden question which thoroughly aroused him. The dawn had come and a dim light was in the chamber, strangely dim and sombre after the light and movement in his dream. He looked across at Maritza's corner and ...
— Princess Maritza • Percy Brebner
... when we crossed the bridge of the Neckar, and plunged into the crowded streets of Heidelberg. Notwithstanding the obscurity, we got a glimpse of the proud old ruin overhanging the place, looking grand and sombre in ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... very black, and very grave, as Darry was also. There was Jem, full of life and waggishness, and bright for any exercise of his wits; and grave shadows used to come over his changeable face often enough too. There was Margaret, with her sombre beauty; and old Theresa with her worn old face. I think there was a certain indescribable reserve of gravity upon them all, but there was not one whose lips did not part in a white line when looking ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... stair of Milosis, and such the city beyond. No wonder they named it the 'Frowning City', for certainly those mighty works in solid granite did seem to frown down upon our littleness in their sombre splendour. This was so even in the sunshine, but when the storm-clouds gathered on her imperial brow Milosis looked more like a supernatural dwelling-place, or some imagining of a poet's brain, than what she is — a mortal city, carven by the patient genius of generations out of the red ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... YORK. Unto you greetings and salutation and worship, you dear, sweet little rightly-named Joy! I can see you now almost as vividly as I saw you that night when you sat flashing and beaming upon those sombre swallow-tails. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... in a low, sombre voice, speaking as though to herself. "Well, I suppose it's better for me to know—not to go on hoping, and hoping, and hoping. It means less misery ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... Wolf's lips with such joyous confidence that the grave musician's sombre face brightened; but it swiftly darkened again, and he exclaimed, "We don't give such hasty work!" When the knight tried to tell him what he had in mind, the other brusquely interrupted with the request that he would first aid him in a more important ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... province." At all events, when the Emperor parted with all his provinces by abdicating his throne, he retained some of Titian's pictures. When he betook himself to gardening, watchmaking, and manifold masses at San Yuste, the sole luxury to be found in his simple apartments, with their hangings of sombre brown, was that master's St. Jerome, meditating in a cavern scooped in the cliffs of a green and pleasant valley—a fitting emblem of his own retreat. Before this appropriate picture, or the "Glory," which hung in the church ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects, and Curiosities of Art, (Vol. 2 of 3) • Shearjashub Spooner
... accompanied by her excellent mother. She has since married —— Hemans, Esq., then an Adjutant in the army. A great number of her pieces have appeared in the Monthly Magazine, as well as the New Monthly, and although a pleasing pensiveness and sombre cast of mind seem to pervade her beautifully mental pictures, she was, I may say, noted in her youth for the buoyancy and sprightliness of her conversation and manner, which made her the delight and charm of every society with ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 550, June 2, 1832 • Various
... His height was unremarkable, but he had immensely powerful shoulders, and a bull-like breadth of chest, that imparted a certain air of arrogance to his gait. His black brows met shaggily over eyes of sombre brown. Undeniably ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... grenadier at his gentleman's shaving elbow. "I told the truth, sir, and nothing but the truth," said he, with sombre dignity. ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... miniature, icy cold, black, solitary, silent, River of Death, who shall live in sight of your blackness? Who may sing aloud at his toil, whether he dig, or plant, or plough, or trap, or fish? Beautiful though the grand sweep and headlong rush of the fall, the people of the settlement avoid its sombre majesty and farms were none and smaller clearings few along the upper St. Ignace. A quarter of a mile back from the fall lay the village, holding a cluster of poor houses, a shop or two, a blacksmith's forge, a large and well-conducted summer hotel patronized ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... luncheon with an air of relief. He was a man of little more than middle-age, powerfully built, inclined to be sombre, with features of a legal type, heavily jawed. "Always tactful, dear hostess," he murmured. "As a matter of fact, nothing but the circumstance that it was your invitation and that Madame Selarne was to be present, brought me here to-day. It is so hard to avoid speaking of the great things, ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... departed from his eyes. An elegant gentleman was Mr. Wilding, tall, and seeming even taller by virtue of his exceeding slenderness. He had the courage to wear his own hair, which was of a dark brown and very luxuriant; dark brown too were his sombre eyes, low-lidded and set at a downward slant. From those odd eyes of his, his countenance gathered an air of superciliousness tempered by a gentle melancholy. For the rest, it was scored by lines ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... but a sad Paris. Rather it is a busy Paris; a Paris that stays indoors and works. For an hour or two after twilight the crowds come out; Sunday also they throng the boulevards. And the theatres are always well filled; and there the bright dress uniforms of the men overcome the sombre gowns of the women and the scenes in lobbies and foyers are not far from brilliant. Bands and orchestras play in the theatres, but the music lacks fire. It is beautiful music, carefully done, artistically executed, but the orchestras are made up for the most ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... Her first novel, Alcidamie, not to be confounded with the earlier Alcidiane, was a scarcely concealed utilising of the famous scandal about Tancrede de Rohan (Mlle. des Jardins' mother had been a dependant on the Rohan family, and she herself was much befriended by that formidable and sombre-fated enchantress, Mme. de Montbazon). In fact, common as is the real or imputed "key"-interest in these romances from the Astree onwards, none seems to have borrowed more from at least gossip than this. Her later performances, Les Annales Galantes de la Grece (said to ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... determined to know his fate before he reached Viola's home. When midway the bridge he pulled his reins and the horse stood still. The dark waters of the small river swept on beneath them. Night had just begun to spread out her sombre wings, bedecked with silent stars. Just in front of them, as they looked out upon the center of the river, the river took a bend which brought a shore directly facing them. A green lawn began from the shore and ran back to be lost ...
— Imperium in Imperio: A Study Of The Negro Race Problem - A Novel • Sutton E. Griggs
... by a number of men who proclaimed his virtues and power in loud voices. He was seated in a chair carried by sixteen men; his guards, the officers of his household, standard and umbrella bearers, and musicians accompanied him. He was clothed in a robe of sombre-coloured silk, and wore a velvet cap, very similar in shape to that of Scotch mountaineers. A large pearl was conspicuous on his forehead, and was the only jewel or ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... rounded a point, he thought he saw far down the lake, against the blue of the sky and above the sombre forest, a flutter of red. At the same moment be glanced behind him to see if he were still free from pursuit. Alas! He was not. Two canoes, each urged by half a dozen gleaming paddles, were following as swiftly and silently as sharks ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... had fallen away into pine-clad slopes, and vari-colored rocks flung notes of scarlet and gold through the sombre green of the pines—like the riotous treble cries of an organ pricking the sullen murmur of the bass. So still were the clean waters that we seemed midway between ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... courtyard of a Japanese temple, in the solemn half-light of the sombre firs, there stands a large stone basin, cut from a single block, and filled to the brim with water. The trees, the basin, and a few stone lanterns—so called from their form, and not their function, for they have votive pebbles where we should look for wicks—are the sole ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... you and I will tell you all about it. She lives up in one of your most desolate streets, Lafayette Place, I think, they call it, and in such a sombre house that it looks as if the windows had never been opened. Her mother is dead, and such a faded, hopeless-looking woman takes care of the house, a relation of the father's, I understand, who is a business friend of George's, and with whom he tells me he ...
— Colonel Carter's Christmas and The Romance of an Old-Fashioned Gentleman • F. Hopkinson Smith
... as a woman's; but the lines in his face were graven deep, without effeminacy, and his slender neck was muscled like a wrestler's. In dress he was not unlike the men about him—Texas boots, a broad sombrero, and a canvas coat to turn the rain,—but his manner was that of another world, a sombre, scholarly repose such as you would look for in the reference room of the Boston Public Library; and he crouched back in his corner like a shy, retiring mouse. For a moment the cowman regarded him intently, as if seeking for ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... and three o'clock in the morning Julie sat up, sombre and moody, beside her sleeping husband, in the room dimly lighted by the flickering lamp. Deep silence prevailed. Her agony of remorse had lasted near an hour; how bitter her tears had been none perhaps can realize save women ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... Maud, who in general objected to people's doing as they liked, had replied; and it bore, this unexpectedness, a good deal of looking into. There were many explanations, and they were all amusing—amusing, that is, in the line of the sombre and brooding amusement, cultivated by Kate in her actual high retreat. Merton Densher came the very next Sunday; but Mrs. Lowder was so consistently magnanimous as to make it possible to her niece to see him alone. She saw him, however, on the Sunday ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... dreadful prisons I fancied myself in the times of the martyrs, and gladly would I have chosen this sombre abode for my dwelling if there had been any question of confessing my faith. Presently the guide's voice roused me from my reverie, and I crossed the "Bridge of Sighs," so called because of the sighs ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... the sombre night is dumb, Hushed the loud chrysanthemum, Sister, sleep! Sleep, the lissom lily saith, Sleep, the ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang
... the primitive world-history are suffused in the Jehovist with a peculiar sombre earnestness, a kind of antique philosophy of history, almost bordering on pessimism: as if mankind were groaning under some dreadful weight, the pressure not so much of sin as of creaturehood (vi. 1-4). We notice a shy, timid spirit, which belongs ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... rather ridiculous his adventure with Henry Grey. In a far distant day he would tell Ann. As he halted at the foot of the steps, he thought of his only interview with Lincoln. The tall figure with the sombre face left in his memory that haunting sense of the unusual of which others had spoken and which was apt to disappear ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... Answer, sombre beast and dreary, Where is Brown, the young, the cheery, Smith, the pride of all his friends and half the Force? You were at that last dread dak We must cover at a walk, Bring them back ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... Some sombre-hued birds on the ground fly into the air as they approach. The transformation from dark feathers to brilliant yellow plumage as they spread their wings in flight is pleasing ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... of a few feet you may see two springs, one sending its waters to the Polar solitudes, the other to the eternal Carib summer. One morning at sunrise, as we were breaking camp, I was startled to hear one of our party, a frontiersman born, intoning these words of sombre majesty:— ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... through many dark and intricate passages in my progress to the studio of his master. Much that I encountered on the way contributed, I know not how, to heighten the vague sentiments of which I have already spoken. While the objects around me—while the carvings of the ceilings, the sombre tapestries of the walls, the ebon blackness of the floors, and the phantasmagoric armorial trophies which rattled as I strode, were but matters to which, or to such as which, I had been accustomed from my infancy—while ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... few moments the door was thrown open, and a spruce, dapper looking gentleman, clothed in sombre colored garments, irreproachable linen, and carrying a small merino bag in ...
— Vellenaux - A Novel • Edmund William Forrest
... with sombre meaning. He was always a pessimistically inclined man; and, in his rough way, he had conceived a good deal of affection and respect ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... usually lined with Phynotomi and Sitones both an indeterminate grey, and Otiorhynchi, black or tan-coloured. Now I have sometimes happened to unearth from her cells a collection of veritable jewels which, thanks to their bright metallic lustre, made a most striking contrast with the sombre Otiorhynchus. These were the Rhynchites (R. betuleti), who roll the vine-leaves into cigars. Equally magnificent, some of them were azure blue, others copper gilt, for the cigar-roller has a twofold colouring. How did the Cerceris manage to recognize in these jewels the Weevil, the ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... twitched, and deep in the dead eyes a sombre fire glowed. It warmed his cold humour to read so plainly the thought hidden behind the smooth words. But to a mind as fertile as the King's that very thought was a suggestion. It would be well that this La Mothe should clearly understand all ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... the king and the governess of his children. It was whispered at the petit lever, confirmed at the grand entree, and was common gossip by the time that the king had returned from chapel. Back into wardrobe and drawer went the flaring silks and the feathered hats, and out once more came the sombre coat and the matronly dress. Scudery and Calpernedi gave place to the missal and St. Thomas a Kempis, while Bourdaloue, after preaching for a week to empty benches, found his chapel packed to the last seat with weary gentlemen and taper-bearing ladies. By midday there was ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Mabel would understand any of this if she heard it. She has a robust and coarse-textured mind curiously contrasted with her pale, delicate features and sombre black eyes. She was one of those people who seem suddenly to transmute themselves into totally different beings the moment one speaks to them. As the author did one evening, after peering absently through the ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... stepped forward, Mr. Whitmore had instantly shot out his right hand to the door—against which Mr. Rogers, however, had planted his foot—with a gesture as if to slam it in our faces. But the sombre apparition of the Rector seemed to freeze him where he stood—or all of him but his left hand which, grasping the candlestick, slowly and as if involuntarily lifted it above the level of his eyes. Then, before the Rector had concluded, he lowered ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... stern and sombre, gray-haired figure he, And standing midst the wreck of youthful dreams Sees he at times through battle smoke the gleams Of rippling waves on blue Ionian Sea? Thinks he not sadly on the days now gone, And dreams ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... top of the ridge they had climbed, the man and the pup alone looked down on the camp, for the weary little "Injun" had fallen asleep. Had he been awake, the all to be seen would have been of little promise. Great, sombre mountains towered darkly up on every side, roofed over by an arch of sky amazingly brilliant with stars. Below, the darkness was the denser for the depth of the hollow in the hills. Vaguely the one ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels
... the poem; but the drawings of Italian landscape, so sure in outline, so vivid in colour; the views of old Italian city life, rich in the tumult of townsfolk, military chieftains, men-at-arms; the pictures of sombre interiors, and southern gardens, the hillside castle amid its vines, the court of love with its contending minstrels, the midnight camp lit by its fires; and, added to these, the Titianesque portraits ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... throat of the little creature which had excited our admiration shone with the most brilliant tints, though the rest of the body was of a more sombre hue. The upper parts of the body were of a pale, dusky green, except the wings, which were of the purple-brown tint common to humming-birds in general. The head and throat were of the most resplendent hue, with an emerald green triangular patch on the throat, while a broad collar ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... shivering, I stopped to glance about me full of sick apprehension. For all I knew, this might be the very wood where my youthful father had staggered and fallen, to tear at the tender grass with dying fingers; these sombre, leafy aisles perhaps had echoed to the shot—his gasping moan that had borne his young spirit up to the Infinite! At this thought, Horror leapt upon me, wherefore I sought to flee these gloomy shades, only to trip and fall heavily, ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... night was clear though cold, he threw His chamber door wide open[779]—and went forth Into a gallery of a sombre hue, Long, furnished with old pictures of great worth, Of knights and dames heroic and chaste too, As doubtless should be people of high birth; But by dim lights the portraits of the dead Have something ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... his broad brow contracted; his face became as sombre as the skies above them. Some memory of awful bitterness distorted for a moment his features, but he said nothing. Like all strong men, he drove down his emotions to the depths of his heart; thinking perhaps, as simple characters ...
— Adieu • Honore de Balzac
... lower corridor with sombre tread. He would cut belly at the garden pond. With some surprise he noted an amado open at the end of the ro[u]ka. Voices were heard. Standing at the opening he saw lanterns. Some frenzied women had raised a ladder to the garden wall. They would thus escape, but the knife-like ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... night, nothing in the way of provisions was found; the guard and the corps which had been there before the battle had devoured everything. No provisions were left of those taken along from Moscow. The army passed a sombre and bitter cold night in a forest; great fires were lighted, horse meat was roasted, and the soldiers of Prince Eugene and of Marshal Davout, especially the latter who had been on their feet for three days, slept profoundly around great ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose
... invention of the "soft" pedal, which is intended not solely to reduce the intensity of tone in the pianoforte—that may be accomplished by a modification of force in striking the note—but to give the tones a darker, more sombre quality, or colour. To vary the tone-colour, a violinist or 'cellist draws the bow across the strings close to, or distant from, the bridge, in accordance with his desire for a reed-like or flute-like quality of tone. Anyone who has listened to the performance ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... delicious effect of her singing as we were drifting along in the sombre twilight, better than by quoting Buchanan Read's charming lines, which I dare say you have ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... standing to and fro close to the Pyramid, which I have before described as a dark rocky lump 240 feet high. Its western side is a sombre storm-beaten cliff, whilst to the east it slopes away almost to the water's edge. A few patches of coarse grass may be seen on some sheltered spots. Sealers, I am informed, have landed upon it on certain rare occasions of fine weather, and have been repaid for ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... Christian virtues, and allegoric gentlefolks, are crowded into every room, as if Mrs. Holman had been in heaven and invited every body she saw. The great apartment is first; painted ceilings, inlaid floors, and unpainted wainscots make every room sombre. The tapestries are fine, but, not fine enough, and there are few portraits. The chapel is charming. The great jet d'eau I like, nor would I remove it; whatever is magnificent of the kind in the time it was done, I would retain, else all gardens and houses ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... caves; but their rugged brows still caught the red glare of evening. The flush rose higher and higher, chased by the shadows; and then, after lingering for a moment on their crests of honeysuckle and juniper, passed away, and the whole became sombre and grey. The sea-gull sprang upwards from where he had floated on the ripple, and hied him slowly away to his lodge in his deep-sea stack; the dusky cormorant flitted past, with heavier and more frequent stroke, to his whitened shelf high on the precipice; the pigeons ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... meet. For I hope," said Mrs. Krill, smoothing her face to a smile—it had grown rather sombre—"that we shall often meet again. You must come and see us. We have taken a ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume
... thrill of awe," etc. The Western Barbarian had stood there, gazed, and felt no thrill. "The privileged guest," said the grave historian, "passing in review the lineaments of the illustrious owners of Stukeley, as he slowly paces the sombre gallery, must be conscious of emotions of no ordinary character," etc., etc. The Barbarian had been conscious of no such emotions. And it was for this reason, and believing he MIGHT experience them if left there in solitude, with no distracting or extraneous ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... was a big, broad shouldered man, reddish haired and ruddy cheeked, with cool grey eyes; his sandy mustache was closely cropped and turned up ever so slightly at the corners of his mouth. Despite his colouring, his face was somewhat sombre—even stern—when in repose. It was his fine, enveloping smile that made friends for him wherever he listed, with men and with women. More frequently than otherwise it made more than friends of ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... was really to be pitied. He could not look upon the azure vault without a sombre terror: when asleep, he felt oscillations that made his head reel; and every night he had visions of being swung ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... and stale, not because they are old, but because we cease to see them. Whole vibrant significant worlds around us disappear within the sombre mists of familiarity. Whichever way we look the roads are dull and barren. There is a tree at our gate we have not seen in years: a flower blooms in our door-yard more wonderful than the shining ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... grave, and their almost universal and rapidly increasing decay doesn't relieve their gloom. Nothing indeed can well be sadder than the great collection of Tintorets at San Rocco. Incurable blackness is settling fast upon all of them, and they frown at you across the sombre splendour of their great chambers like gaunt twilight phantoms of pictures. To our children's children Tintoret, as things are going, can be hardly more than a name; and such of them as shall miss the tragic ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... emerald carpet of bilberry and ling. These two flowers are pure white, and the raiment of the moors is that of a bride prepared to meet her bridegroom, the sun. By July the white has passed, and the moors have assumed once more a sombre hue. But August follows, and once again they burst into flower. No longer is their vesture white and virginal; now they bloom as a matron and a queen, gloriously arrayed in a seamless robe of ...
— Tales of the Ridings • F. W. Moorman
... scirocco-day, thought the priest, as he came up on to the flat roof. Overhead, instead of the clear blue proper to that hour of the morning, lay a pale yellow sky darkening even to brown at the horizon. Thabor, before him, hung distant and sombre seen through the impalpable atmosphere of sand, and across the plain, as he glanced behind him, beyond the white streak of Nain nothing was visible except the pale outline of the tops of the hills against the sky. Even at this morning hour, too, the air was hot and breathless, broken only ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... looking Baku—a town of recent creation, approached through a desert of sand and stones, where neither vegetable nor animal life can possibly find an existence. Viewed from the sea, Baku presents a distinctly picturesque appearance, with its sombre citadel, numerous minarets, and the palace of the princes of bygone days towering above the old town, where the houses look as if they were piled the one above the other—the new or Russian quarter being at the base, and lining the shore of ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... the follies of the world abandoned me at the door. I felt no inclination to wrest a humorous idea from those sombre and stately trappings. My mind seemed to stretch itself to grateful repose upon a couch ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... desolation; its waters expanding in their highland solitude, amidst a wide waste of moors, without one green spot to refresh the eye, without a house or tree—all mournful in the brown hue of its far-stretching bogs, and the gray uniformity of its rocks; the surrounding mountains even partook of the sombre character of the place; their forms without grandeur, their ranges continuous and without elevation. The lake itself was certainly as fine as rocky shores and numerous islands could make it: but it was encompassed with such dreariness; it was deformed ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... He knew the kind of hat his mother wanted, and he had noted her quickly suppressed look of disappointment at the sombre hat donated by Mrs. Hudgers on the day of ...
— Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley • Belle K. Maniates
... chattered and laughed—chattered and laughed, seeing an ordinary game between the King and a marker; while I, for whom the court had grown sombre as a dungeon, saw a villain struggling in his own toils, livid with the fear of death, and tortured by horrible apprehensions. Use and habit were still so powerful with the man that he played on mechanically with his hands, ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... the trees from which Cedar Lodge derives its name was still standing. This lonely giant, sombre exile from Libanus, overshadowed all that remained of the formerly extensive garden and sensibly darkened the back of the house. Its foliage, spread like a deep pile carpet upon the wide horizontal branches, was worn and sparse, showing small promise of self-renewal. Yet though starved ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... leaving, caressed the dogs, and said good-bye to the cat, quitted the house on the Three-Notched Road. At the gate they turned, and, standing beneath the mimosa, looked back across the yard where the flowers had been touched by the frost, to the house and the sombre pines. They stood in silence. Jacqueline thought of the first evening beneath the mimosa, of the July dusk, and the cry of the whip-poor-will. Rand thought, suddenly and inconsequently, of his father and mother, standing ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... opened when Elizabeth lost one of her most valuable allies by the murder of the Regent Murray, assassinated by Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh. Murray's figure in history is a sombre one, and the sombreness is thrown into the greater relief by the picturesque brilliancy of his hapless sister. It was his fate to fight on the gloomy side; to stand at the head of a nobility conspicuously sordid and unprincipled, ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... why should I tell her?" said Dame Elsie, as she turned to go into the house, and left the child sitting on the mossy parapet that overlooked the gorge. Thence she could see far off, not only down the dim, sombre abyss, but out to the blue Mediterranean beyond, now calmly lying in swathing-bands of purple, gold, and orange, while the smoky cloud that overhung Vesuvius became silver and rose ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... drink, Jim,' says the Colonel, an' his face has a cloud of regrets onto it; 'take four fingers of this red-eye an' cheer up. You-all assoomes too sombre a view of ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... through the water, gradually increasing her speed. I was eagerly looking out for the coast; at length it came in sight—its distant outline rendered indistinct by the misty pall which hung over it. As we drew nearer, its forest covered heights had a particularly gloomy and sombre appearance, which made me think of the cruelties I had heard were practised on those shores, of the barbarous slave trade, of the fearful idolatries of its dark-skinned children, of its wild beasts, and ...
— The African Trader - The Adventures of Harry Bayford • W. H. G. Kingston
... names: "Green-head," "Wild Duck." Adult male, in fall, winter, and spring, beautifully colored; summer, resembles female—sombre. ...
— Birds, Illustrated by Color Photography [July 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... stand before my mirror at night before I go to bed and admire my own sombre beauty. I let my hair fall in a black cloud over my shoulders, then I braid it slowly with bare arms lifted in graceful poses. I sway my hips like Carmen, I thrust red flowers into my bosom. I move my head ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... silent street by the river, shaded almost to a twilight by the thick foliage, with the old houses all about us, seemed to invite reminiscence, or dreams of the stern and respectable old burghers and burgesses in sombre clothing, wide brimmed hats, and stiffly starched linen ruffs about their necks as rendered by Rembrandt, Hals, Rubens and Jordaens. They must have been veritable domestic despots, magnates of the household, but certainly there must have been something ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... Henry's carelessness, his state apparel was not very apparently dissimilar from his ordinary dress, being generally of dark rich crimson, blue, or russet, with the St. Andrew's cross in white silk on his breast, or else the ruddy lion, but never conspicuously; and the sombre hues always seemed particularly well to suit ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... directly support the family. There was nothing dispiriting in the view of the country on this first day's ride, and though a winter landscape can hardly be exhilarating when it is leafless and bare, gray, and a little sombre in color, we found ourselves under no stress of sympathy with misfortune or want, as is so often the case ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... of Treslong's followers was indeed extraordinary. Every man was attired in the gorgeous vestments of the plundered churches — in gold and embroidered cassocks, glittering robes, or the sombre cowls and garments of Capuchin friars. As they sailed along their wild sea songs rose in the air, mingled with shouts for vengeance on the Spaniards ...
— By Pike and Dyke: A Tale of the Rise of the Dutch Republic • G.A. Henty
... were the trees. At last they rode on almost bare highland, where the dean could look in every direction. He gazed out over immeasurable tracts of land, which went up and down in mountains and valleys covered with sombre forests. It was so dark that he had difficulty in seeing any orderly arrangement; but presently he could make out ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... through the late radiant afternoon they went until the sun sank and the carriage stopped before a gate. While the pickaninny was opening it, another carriage went swiftly behind them, and the Major called out cleanly to the occupants—a quiet, sombre, dignified-looking man and two handsome boys and a little girl. "They're my neighbors, ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... I shall sail with you; For I have often traveled in my dreams To far-off Norway, where you live mid snow And ice and sombre woods of towering pines. There should come mirth and laughter in the hall, If I could have my say, I promise you; For I am merry;—have you ...
— Early Plays - Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans • Henrik Ibsen
... Irma and I sat together in the jutting window, where, as the night darkened and the curtains of the clouds drew down to meet the sombre tree-tops, a kind of black despair came over me. Would "King George" really do any good? Would I prove myself stout and brave when the moment came? Would the beacon we had prepared really burn, and, supposing it did, would any one see it, drowned ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... sight of the encampment veered swiftly to the north into the smouldering sun. Van Brunt could not follow them. He pulled out his watch. It was an hour past midnight. The northward clouds flushed bloodily, and rays of sombre-red shot southward, firing the gloomy woods with a lurid radiance. The air was in breathless calm, not a needle quivered, and the least sounds of the camp were distinct and clear as trumpet calls. ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... and even that was so short as to be barely decent. Six months—yet in that space of time much might happen—things undreamed of and undesired—slow tortures carefully measured out, punishment sudden and heavy! Wrapped in these sombre musings I walked beside him in profound silence. The moon shone brilliantly; groups of girls danced on the shore with their lovers, to the sound of a flute and mandoline—far off across the bay the sound ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... people had put on gala raiment. From the outer fringe of Jerusalem the Jaffa road was blocked not merely with the inhabitants of the City but with people who had followed in the Army's wake from Bethlehem. It was a picturesque throng. There were sombre-clad Jews of all nationalities, Armenians, Greeks, Russians, and all the peoples who make Jerusalem the most cosmopolitan of cities. To the many styles of European dress the brighter robes of the East gave vivid colour, and it was obvious from the remarkably free and spontaneous ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... somewhat more at home when he gets among the Actors and Musicians: though his head is still running upon ORPHEUS and EURYDICE and PLUTO, and other sombre personages; who are ever thrusting themselves in where we least expect them, and who chill every rising emotion ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... banquet hoard and oleanders have been removed, every trace of the funeral has been carefully obliterated. Clear sunlight comes in from the garden windows in the background and lights up the spacious, sombre hall. The bushes and trees of the garden are coated with ice. The fire is burning as usual. Toward the end of the act the sunlight gradually vanishes and a light, gray dusk fills the hall. AUNT CLARA stands at the fireplace with her arms folded over her waist, and looks ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... terror, she could only wait and watch. Nearer it came and nearer. It was gliding into the last bar of light Immediately in front of her! It was on her! God of mercy, it was a Dominican friar! The moon shone clear and cold upon his gaunt figure and his sombre robes. The poor girl threw up her hands, gave one terrible scream of horror, which rang through the old house, and sank senseless to ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... this is the place for Marie now; indeed, dear girl, she knew that well herself. The Marquis pressed her hard to stay, and I said nothing; but Marie insisted on coming home. I thought Henri looked somewhat more sombre than is his wont, as he was leading her down the steps: but he cannot, must not, think of love now, Victorine. La Vendee now ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... woman in the world, but I've nevertheless done for you what was necessary." And then as her now quite sombre gravity only made him stare: "To start you it was necessary. From me it has the weight." He but continued to stare, and she met his blankness with surprise. "Don't you understand me? I've told the proper lie for you." Still he only showed her his flushed strained smile; in ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... "rockery" of skulls and shanks and ribs, and filled it in with earth, enough to furnish growth for trailing nasturtiums, whose bright red and yellow blossoms were strangely at variance with their sombre setting. ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... musk duck: the plumage is very sombre and loose looking—not so thick as most other ducks; the tail, too, is singular, little more than a small fan of short quills. The head of the male has a kind of black leathery excrescence under the bill that gives it an odd expression, and the whole bird has a strange odour ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... whistling; another passed, calling hoarsely the news from the afternoon papers. A muffin man rang his bell, a small boy clattered his stick against the area bailing. The whole world marched on, unmoved and unnoticing. In this sombre apartment alone tragedy reigned in sinister silence. On the sofa, Lord Dorminster, who only half an hour ago had seemed to be in the prime of life and health, ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... stairs and crossing the courtyard, entered St. Honore. I was in a maze what I was to expect from him; and overjoyed as I was at my present deliverance, had a sneaking fear that I might be courting a worse fate in this inquiry; so grim and secretive was my guide's face, and so much did that sombre dress—which gave him somewhat of the character of an inquisitor—add to the weight of his silence. However, when he had crossed St. Honore and entered a lane leading to the river, he halted and turned ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case for the perfectly legitimate, I believe, purpose of bringing it home to the minds and bosoms of the readers. There it was no longer a matter of sincere colouring. It was like another art altogether. That sombre theme had to be given a sinister resonance, a tonality of its own, a continued vibration that, I hoped, would hang in the air and dwell on the ear after the ...
— Notes on My Books • Joseph Conrad
... Then the little sombre figure at Powhatan's feet rose and stood with the firelight shining on her face and dark hair and asked ...
— The Princess Pocahontas • Virginia Watson
... flame and glance, A beacon in the dark, 'mid clouds of chance That wrap mankind Yea, though the counsel fall, undone it shall not be, Whate'er be shaped and fixed within Zeus' ruling mind— Dark as a solemn grove, with sombre leafage shaded, His paths of purpose wind, A marvel to ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... passed was very beautiful, commencing with dark-green ilex, glistening holly, and sombre brown oak, interspersed with groups of the dainty, graceful, white-stemmed birch, and wreathed with festoons of the scarlet Himalayan vine. As we mounted higher, trees became fewer and the foliage less luxuriant, till at length only oaks were to be seen, their ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... having spread over the whole feather; in the most advanced, however, nearly all the feathers were fully coloured with the red of the breeding-plumage. This red plumage remains till the autumn, when it is replaced, after the moult, by the more sombre and less handsome grey of the winter plumage. Though the Bar-tailed Godwit goes far north to breed, not breeding much nearer than Lapland and the north of Norway and Sweden, both old and young soon show themselves again in the Channel Islands on their return journey, ...
— Birds of Guernsey (1879) • Cecil Smith
... open a folding door, ushered us at once into a spacious and lofty saloon, which offered a brilliant contrast to the quaint and sombre apartments we had traversed. It was elegantly furnished, and the walls hung with paintings, yet something of its original architecture had been preserved and blended with modern embellishments. There were the stone-shafted casements and the deep bow-window of former times. The carved and ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... He stood silent at the foot of the tree looking across the chamber at his enemy. Did no feeling of compassion disturb his sombre breast? The man was not wholly evil; he loved flowers (I have been told) and sweet music (he was himself no mean performer on the harpsichord); and, let it be frankly admitted, the idyllic nature of the ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... round to the north, sinking closer to the horizon. The heavens in that quarter grew red and bloody. The shadows lengthened, the light dimmed, and in the sombre recesses of the forest life slowly died away. Even the wild fowl in the river softened their raucous chatter and feigned the nightly farce of going to bed. Only the tribesmen increased their clamor, war-drums booming and voices raised in savage folk songs. But as the sun ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... without having the least doubt in my mind that the only thing he could do was to descend once more from the throne. I communicated to him all the particulars I had just received, and I did not hesitate to advise him to follow the only course worthy of him. He listened to me with a sombre air, and though he was in some measure master of himself, the agitation of his mind and the sense of his position betrayed themselves in his face and in all his motions. 'I know,' said I, 'that your Majesty may still keep the sword drawn, but with whom, ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... Marguerite was still alive. He saw her constantly reappearing in a funny way among the sombre preoccupations with which war was overshadowing ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... phases of virtue and its rewards. Beauty he replaced with ugliness; dreary squalor was the setting for crippled body and deformed mind. The heavy twilight of Scandinavian insanity touched his pages where sombre shapes born out of Jewish Russia moved like anachronisms through the unpolluted sunshine of ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... this brilliant fete of illuminations underwent a sensible abatement of splendour, then almost ceased. The walls assumed a crystallised though sombre appearance; mica was more closely mingled with the feldspar and quartz to form the proper rocky foundations of the earth, which bears without distortion or crushing the weight of the four terrestrial systems. We were immured within ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... an evening of early October 1851 when I crossed the Rhone on my way to the Alps. It had rained heavily during the day, and sombre clouds still rested on the towers of Lyons behind me. The river was in flood, and the lamps on the bridge threw a troubled gleam upon the impetuous current as it rolled underneath. It was impossible not to recollect that this was the stream on the banks of which Irenaeus, ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... door quietly, and moved in silence towards the bed. She nodded an affectionate welcome. He returned her greeting eagerly, and all his constraint was loosed away, and he felt at ease, and happy. Her face was very pale indeed against the glittering blackness of her eyes, and her sombre disordered hair and untidy dress; but it did not show fatigue nor extreme anxiety; it was a face of calm meekness. The sleeves of her dress were reversed, showing the forearms, which gave her an appearance of deshabille, homely, ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... monotony. Strict injunctions had been given by the doctors to avoid exciting me; and consequently, every one that came in walked on tiptoe, spoke in whispers, and left me in five minutes. Reading was absolutely forbidden; and with a sombre half-light to sit in, and chicken broth to support nature, I dragged out as dreary an existence as any gentleman ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... best to be obedient." She became more and more pleasing to him, and he tried to please her by presenting to her a variety of pretty pictures and playthings, and by consulting her wishes in whatever she desired. She was still wearing the dress of mourning, of sombre color and of soft material, and it was only now at last that she began to smile a little, and this filled Genji with delight. He now had to return to the eastern wing, and Violet, for the first time, went to the casement and looked out on the scenery around. The trees covered with ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... is all one heavy dull hue in the sombre evening light, and against it the sharp glints of fire as the shrapnel bursts, and the round puff-balls of white smoke show vividly. Every now and then a great curtain of murky vapour goes up to show where the old lyddite-slinger in the rear is depositing his contributions. ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... Jack Glover who caught her and carried her to the sofa. She woke with a confused idea that somebody was trying to hypnotise her, and she opened her eyes to look upon the sombre face ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... human affections. As a literary artist of the "dark and touching mode of painting," which Carleton has set down as the chief characteristic of his brother novelist, Griffin has few equals and no superior. To depict the more sombre tints of human nature, to trace the unbroken events linked together in a career of crime, from the first commission of evil till its last expiation in the felon ship, or on the gallows, he especially delights. He does not delay the progress of the plot to impress upon his reader the ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... and when he crossed the threshold and sat down in his armchair, his love for his house had surprised him, and he sat like one enchanted by his own fireside, lost in admiration of the old mahogany bookcase with the inlaid panels, that he had bought at an auction. How sombre and quaint it looked, furnished with his books that he had had bound in Dublin, and what pleasure it always was to him to see a ray lighting up the parchment bindings! He had hung some engravings on his walls, and these had become very dear to him; and there were some spoons, bought ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... though once or twice they thought they heard distant sounds, these might be caused by the passage of a wild animal through the bushes. The sentries were all vigilant. It was the first time that the Sussex lads had been in face of an enemy, and the stillness of the night, the sombre forest in front of them, and the possibility of a savage and unknown foe lurking there, kept them thoroughly on the alert. Once or twice Wulf and Osgod went forward to examine some bush that had seemed to the imagination of a sentry to have moved, but ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... pond to whose edge Leonard and Ruth presently came was a narrow piece of clear water held in between Bylow Hill and the loftier cliff beyond by an old stone dam long unused. Rude ledges of sombre rock underlay its depths and lined and shelved its sides. Broad beeches and dark hemlocks overhung it. At every turn it mirrored back the slanting forms of the white and the yellow birch, or slept under green mantles of lily pads. It bore a haunted air even in the floweriest days of the year, when ...
— Bylow Hill • George Washington Cable
... water of the Senegal is fresh: we quenched our thirst at our pleasure. We stopped at last; it was only eight o'clock in the morning. We had no shelter during the whole day, except some trees, which were of a kind unknown to me, and which had a sombre foliage. I frequently went into the river, but without venturing too far from the bank, for fear of ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 • J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard
... this scene, "Les Terreurs de Thoas," those rapidly changing expressions of the features, those statuesque attitudes melting into each other, which we all remember in Rachel, indicated a common origin. It needed not the added eloquence of words and the sombre music of the voice to tell the tragic story of the victim of the Eumenides. After listening to the recitation, I was not surprised to learn that the young student was to appear, under the auspices of his teacher, at the Theatre ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... Shakespeare's mastery in the development of the heroic nature amid heroic circumstances; and had he chosen, from English history, to deal with Coeur-de-Lion or Edward the First, the innate quality of his subject would doubtless have called into play something of that profound and sombre power which in Julius Caesar and Macbeth has sounded the depths of mighty character. True, on the whole, to fact, it is another side of kingship which he has made prominent in his English histories. The irony [186] of kingship—average human nature, flung with a wonderfully pathetic ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... mist thin, invisible to the human eye; yet strong enough to change the sun into a mere glowing red disc, a disc vertical and hot, rolling down to the edge of the horizontal and cold-looking disc of the shining sea. Then the edges touched and the circular expanse of water took on suddenly a tint, sombre, like a frown; deep, like the brooding ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... sense of adventure) that he would rather do it when we arrived—if we ever did. I was by no means so delicate; I bought a varied selection of pork-pies at a little shop that was open (why was that shop open?—it is all a mystery), and ate them as we went along. The beginning was sombre and irritating. I was annoyed, not with people, but with things, like a baby; with the motor for breaking down and with Sunday for being Sunday. And the sight of the northern slums expanded and ennobled, but did not decrease, my gloom: Whitechapel ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... her beauty, and that stamp of royal grace which comes with kingly blood and the daily exercise of power? Like the rich wonders of the robe she wore, her very barbarism, of which now I saw but the better side, drew and dazzled my mind's eye, giving her woman's tenderness some new quality, sombre and strange, an eastern richness which is lacking in our well schooled English women, that at one and the same stroke touched both the imagination and the senses, and through them enthralled ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... which consists in not always employing pleasing tints, but of sometimes taking advantage of the effects to be derived from impure hues, as Poussin did in his "Deluge." In this work, neither black nor white, blue, red, nor yellow appears; the whole mass being, with little variation, of a sombre grey, the true resemblance of a dark and humid atmosphere, by which every object is rendered indistinct and almost colourless. This absence of colour, however, is a merit, and not a fault. Vandyke employed such means with admirable effect in the background of a Crucifixion, ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... of sunset was already fading into the sombre shadows of night, when two travellers might have been observed swiftly—at a pace of six miles in the hour—descending the rugged side of a mountain; the younger bounding from crag to crag with the agility of a fawn, while his companion, whose aged limbs seemed ill at ease in the heavy chain armour ...
— A Tangled Tale • Lewis Carroll
... expansive, merry, ardent, enthusiastic, young in heart and mind, a thoroughly open nature. Her husband, on the other hand, was of a morose, sombre, melancholy, reserved nature. In spite of her superior intelligence Hortense had a sort of childlike air; but Louis, though young in years, had the character and appearance of an old man. As much ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... appeared the woodland scenery around me! The sombre green of pines, and the equally dark though glossy foliage of oaks, were beautifully enlivened by lighter greens, and by the brilliant hues of the sassafras-tree. Here climbed in tantalizing beauty—tempting as insidious ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... found a taciturn and sombre man beside a pair of saddle-horses; and thenceforward, all night long, we wandered in silence by the most occult and dangerous paths among the mountains. A little before the dayspring we took refuge in a wet and gusty cavern at the bottom ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... remarkably intelligent countenance came up and asked me if I should like to see the inside. I told him I should, whereupon he said that he was the clerk and would admit me with pleasure. Taking a key out of his pocket he unlocked the door of the church and we went in. The inside was sombre, not so much owing to the gloominess of the day as the heaviness of the architecture. It presented something in the form of a cross. I soon found the clerk what his countenance represented him to be, a highly intelligent person. His answers to my questions ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... of cheek, she was saying aloud, in a tone cold as ice, "And indeed, most excellent Gabinius, you must pardon me for being startled; for all that I know of you tells me that you are likely to find a sombre Vestal sorry ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... evident to me that he moved but half-heartedly in this higher circle. On one occasion, too, he appeared in the trousers of a lounge-suit of tweeds instead of his dress trousers, and with tan boots. The trousers, to be sure, were of a sombre hue, but the brown boots were quite too dreadfully unmistakable. After this I may say that I looked for anything, and my ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... sombre evening, when I sit And feed in solitude at home, Perchance an ultra-bilious fit Paints all the ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... one of the most sombre of the houses, and our taxi-driver, with evident relief, made off in ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... the gloom. The wind, I was told, came through the windows on the sea side with such force as to overturn the chalices, and blow out the tapers on the altar, whereupon every opening was walled up, except a rose at the end of the chancel, and a few slits in the nave, above the side-aisles. A sombre twilight, like that of a stormy day, fills the edifice. Here the rustling of stoles and the muttering of prayers suggest incantation rather than worship; the organ has a hollow, sepulchral sound ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... lines of sombre thought, puzzled thought, it seemed to Anne. But to Lydia it looked as if this kidnapping of Madame Beattie from the past and thrusting her into the present discussion was only a pretext for talking about Esther. Of course, she knew, he was wildly anxious to enter ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... and requested her to take the paper, which I marked, to Mr. Livermore; and as soon as my breakfast was over, I hastened to make my usual call. I found him looking very sombre. ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... was himself one of a family of fourteen, and yet his mother was alive and hearty. It was quite the exception for anything to go wrong. And yet in spite of his reasonings the remembrance of his wife's condition was always like a sombre background to all ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... shared his pleasures with his sons, and so the years passed on with rays of brilliant sunshine piercing the clouds of darkling deeds. Alexandre Dumas has well summed up the character of Cosimo de' Medici: "He had," he says, "all the vices which rendered his private life sombre, and all the virtues which made his life in public renowned for splendour; whilst his family experienced unexampled misfortune, his people ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... to talk to me, he said, and I followed him out through the yard on to the soft road that climbs the hill to westward. The evening was falling slowly and mournfully; it was dark already in the folds of the sombre downs. ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... lee rigging, handing their eyes to shield the wind and spray. Faint as yet against the sombre monotone of sea and sky, a long line of breaking water leapt to their gaze, then vanished, as the staggering barque drove to the trough; again—again; there could be no doubt. Breakers! On ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... with an irresistible force. The great empires which followed each other in Western Asia, in destroying its hope of a terrestrial kingdom, threw it into religious dreams, which it cherished with a kind of sombre passion. Caring little for the national dynasty or political independence, it accepted all governments which permitted it to practise freely its worship and follow its usages. Israel will henceforward have ...
— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan
... before they begin!' he said, and lay sombre and frowning on his pillows, till Chicksands had beguiled him by some letters from men in Desmond's own division which he had taken special trouble to collect ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 1894. All about us was the empty infinitude; the twilight desert swept by a great cold wind; the desert that rolled, in dull, dead colours, under a still more sombre sky which, on the circular horizon, seemed to fall on ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... could come back to earth the gloom of the forest shut in above their heads once more. They put the horses to a canter as soon as the ridge was cleared, for there were still ten miles to go and the light was waning. Jeremy was very much at home in the woods, but the chill, sombre depths that appeared and reappeared on either hand seemed to warn him to be prepared. He reached to the saddlebow, undid the flap of the pistol holster, and made sure that his weapon was loaded, then put it back, reassured. The footing was bad, and they had to ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... quickly, and, turning in the direction of Maria I saw her body being caught up by the current and sucked painfully forward into the opening her delicate hands had made.... It was too horrible to endure!... Now, while there is no blood of martyrs in my veins, and while I had PROMISED the sombre figure in Berlin TO DO A CERTAIN THING which a martyr impulse might prevent if I tried to be a hero in this instance, I simply could not look at that girl's struggles without going to her rescue no matter what ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... caught a glimpse of a hard-set jaw and a mouth about which strong lines of determination had woven themselves. Yet, as soon as Cumshaw fancied he was observed, the mask of his face melted into a smile, and the sombre eyes sparkled with a humor that somehow seemed too real ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... appearance of a beautiful Spanish town, with its Romanesque piazzas, churches, many arched buildings peeping through breaks in a line of mahogany, bread- fruit, mango, tamarind, and palm trees,—an irregular mass of at least fifty different tints, from a fiery emerald to a sombre bluish-green. But on entering the streets the illusion of beauty passes: you find yourself in a crumbling, decaying town, with buildings only two stories high. The lower part, of arched Spanish design, ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... rock, down which in certain seasons the torrents sweep vast quantities of stone into the river. These rocks are of a whitish brown, and towards the base of a gray colour, and so hard, that on striking them with steel, they yield a fire like flint. This sombre appearance is in some places scarcely relieved by a single tree, though near the river and on the creeks there is more timber, among which are some tall pine: several of these might be made into canoes, and by lashing two of them together, one of ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... justice in her being dressed as she was, for she really was not so old as she looked by two or three years; and there was reason in Mrs. Bowen's carrying in the hollow of her left arm the India shawl sacque she had taken off and hung there; the deep cherry silk lining gave life to the sombre tints prevailing in her dress, which its removal left free to express all the grace of her extremely lady-like person. Lady-like was the word for Mrs. Bowen throughout—for the turn of her head, the management ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... with the twenty cents for Miss Lowery. We saw her aboard her ferryboat, and stood watching her wave her handkerchief at us until it was the tiniest white patch imaginable. And then Tripp and I faced each other, brought back to earth, left dry and desolate in the shade of the sombre ...
— Options • O. Henry
... it was that the Frost King kept the land bound captive in icy chains, but at last the signal for freedom came. The trees awoke from their winter sleep, and, casting off their sombre garments of sheathed leaves, came forth in vestments of tender green; the bees, too, sent out their pioneers, who hastened back to the hives with the glad tidings of the sunshine and of awakening flowers. The birds flew hither and thither on joyous wings, twittering their simple gratitude to Him ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... Here was a sombre dining-room with decanters and glasses, bedrooms with satin down quilts spread over the foot of the bed, and adjoining one of them a dressing-room with pomades and perfumes and rows of boots just as its owner had left it. Who he might be, ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... fete of illuminations underwent a sensible abatement of splendour, then almost ceased. The walls assumed a crystallised though sombre appearance; mica was more closely mingled with the feldspar and quartz to form the proper rocky foundations of the earth, which bears without distortion or crushing the weight of the four terrestrial systems. We were immured within prison ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... naturally dealt in skins and furs, which, before the days of sombre black coats and tweed suits, were in great request, and were the distinguishing badge of rank and high estate. The Haberdashers united into one guild the Hat Merchants; the Haberdashers of Hats including the crafts ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... Court, a quiet, dull nook on the east side of the Temple, to the south of that sombre Grecian temple where the Master resides, was the scene of a very horrible crime. Sarah Malcolm, a laundress, aged twenty-two, employed by a young barrister named Kerrol in the same court, gaining access to the rooms of an old lady named Duncomb, whom she knew to have money, ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... in this Poe excels Byron—is a psychic effect the same as that which remains after viewing certain pictures in black and white, the shade gradations of which are so artistic as to create an illusion of color—sombre, highly shaded, yet color. This color effect of Poe's poetry I have felt very slightly, if at all, immediately on a first reading, as I feel the music of his verse—a rereading, or the lapse of time, being required for its full development. I have not read a line of Poe in the last ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... translate his outward serenity into an impression of severity. But truth keeps one from being hysterical. Is a demagogue a friend of the people because he will lie to them to make them cry and raise false hopes? A search for perfect truths throws out a beauty more spiritual than sensuous. A sombre dignity of style is often confused by under-imagination and by surface-sentiment, with austerity. If Emerson's manner is not always beautiful in accordance with accepted standards, why not accept a few other standards? He is an ascetic, ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... Lord Henry, dreamily, "the costume of the nineteenth century is detestable. It is so sombre, so depressing. Sin is the only real ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... into dusk, and Jocelyn sat musing beside the corpse of Mrs. Pierston. Avice having gone away nobody knew whither, he had acted as the nearest friend of the family, and attended as well as he could to the sombre duties necessitated by her mother's decease. It was doubtful, indeed, if anybody else were in a position to do so. Of Avice the Second's two brothers, one had been drowned at sea, and the other had emigrated, ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... who might really coerce attention. There was in Mrs. Brookenham's way of looking up at her a dim despairing abandonment of the idea of any common personal ground. Lady Fanny, magnificent, simple, stupid, had almost the stature of her brother, a forehead unsurpassably low and an air of sombre concentration just sufficiently corrected by something in her movements that failed to give it a point. Her blue eyes were heavy in spite of being perhaps a couple of shades too clear, and the wealth of her black hair, the disposition ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... prays that God will send All pain from earth. Pain has its use and place; Its ministry of holiness and grace. The darker tones upon the canvas blend With light and colour; and their shadows lend The painting half its dignity. Efface The sombre background, and you lose all trace Of that perfection which is ...
— The Englishman and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... points in its history I have no space to tell; as of the "Clercs de l'Echiquier" called the "Basoche," a merry company established in 1430, and enlivening the records of the law for many centuries afterwards, as you will see at the visit of Henri II. But after all, the main impression is a very sombre one. The bitter sarcasms of Rabelais are but too well founded. Mediaeval justice was almost as terrible as mediaeval crime, and both were followed only too frequently by death. For these old judges let no money ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... sharpness. People walked in silence without knowing why they did not care to speak. And even the girls, discreet in ribbons and shining boots, thought less of kisses than they generally did on Sunday. The older people, sober by temperament, became sombre under the influence of sad, breathless sky, and breathless waters. The coldness that lay in the bosom of nature soon found its way to the responsive bosom of humanity. It chilled Uniacke in the pulpit, Sir Graham in the pew below. The one preached without heart. The other listened ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... it seemed to her, an interminably long way, they stopped opposite a tall stone house, one of a row all just alike, and looking very monotonous and sombre to Lucy's eyes, accustomed to the ...
— Lucy Raymond - Or, The Children's Watchword • Agnes Maule Machar
... in the balconies, dressed in their best—like bands of fluttering ribbon stretched across the sombre-fronted palaces; aristocratic daughters, and dainty consorts. They are not chary of their charms. They laugh, fan themselves, lean over sculptured balustrades, and eye the crowded streets, talking with lip and fan, ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... with a challenging immensity, mocking the pitiful grasp of these pygmies on the thousand hills. The snow on the taller of the peaks still held the high lights. But all the valleys and the spaces between the mountains were wrapped in sombre shadows; the crazy house invading the great company of mountains, penetrating brazenly to the very threshold of their silent councils, seemed but a pitiful ant-hill at the mercy of some possible giant tread. The ill-adjusted family, disputing every ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... looked out meditatively at the dense and sombre wilderness, upon which this little clearing and humble log-cabin were but meagre suggestions of that strong, full-pulsed humanity that has elsewhere subdued nature, and ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... learned all that history and tradition has to tell us about Mary Blandy; but what do we really know of that sombre soul that sinned and suffered and passed to its appointed place so long ago? A few "facts," some "circumstances"—which, if we may believe the dictum of Mr. Baron Legge, cannot lie; and yet she remains for us dark and inscrutable as in her portrait, where she sits calmly in her cell, preparing ...
— Trial of Mary Blandy • William Roughead
... and a desire for revenge succeeded. I could see the officers passing back and forth talking and gesticulating. A dozen troopers under a flag of truce came forward to pick up the wounded, and without even challenging we permitted them to do their work. The house remained quiet, sombre, silent, nothing showing but the dark barrels of our carbines. The infantry battalion at the gate moved against the left of the cavalry, and couriers were despatched to hurry up more. Out by the ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... boulders—dripping silently from ledge to ledge, had the pathos of tears. The deathly stillness was broken only by the dismal caw of a crow taking abrupt flight from a blasted pine. Here and there a birch with its white satin skin glimmered spectrally among the sombre foliage. ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... purple of the night Is spread, wine-dark, above, But glistens with no gems of light, To hint of Heaven's love. A sombre pall hangs overhead, Fringed with lurid clouds of lead,— O'er the sleeping earth below One long, wide waste of silent snow, And the wind moans drearily As it wanders by, And the night wanes ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow—Book 3 - Christmas Poems from 'round the World • Various
... a majesty in that slight figure, clad in its sombre mourning drapery, which awed him. There was a set, marble pallor upon the beautiful face, and Arthur Ferris could not see the sapphire blue eyes veiled with their fringing lashes. He had started forward, had stretched out appealing hands, and murmured "Alice," but the youthful heiress ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... on the countenances of those assembled slave-drivers as they listened to the delegates' report. The sombre silence that followed was broken at length by Mr Rushton, who suddenly started up and said that he began to think they had made a mistake in going outside the constituency at all to look for a man. It was strange but true that a prophet never received honour in his own land. They had ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... nodded, with sombre meaning. He was always a pessimistically inclined man; and, in his rough way, he had conceived a good deal of affection and ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... your comrades' praise— All that romance that seemed so fair Grows dim, and you are left to bear The prose of duty's sombre ways And labour of ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 23, 1914 • Various
... mysteries, wrapt in celestial reveries, yet going forth from dreary cells to feed the hungry and clothe the naked, and still more, to give spiritual consolations to the poor and miserable. It was a great scheme of philanthropy, as well as a haven of rest. It was always sombre in its attire, ascetic in its habits, intolerant in its dogmas, secluded in its life, narrow in its views, and repulsive in its austerities; but its leaders and dignitaries did not then conceal under their coarse raiments either ambition, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... grown sombre, and to Jimmie, gazing at him, it seemed that all the sorrows of the world were in his tired grey eyes. "Perhaps ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... youthfulness only make that fact more obvious. Forget-me-nots, mignonettes, certain pretty white flowers, the palest of pink roses, or the most delicate tint of yellow veiled with lace are not inappropriate for those who do not enjoy wearing sombre bonnets and hats which are composed only of rich, black textures. Lace cleverly intermingled with velvet and jewelled ornaments of dull, rich shades are exceedingly effective on the head-gear of ...
— What Dress Makes of Us • Dorothy Quigley
... on the harp for Le Gardeur the airs which she knew he liked best. His sombre mood yielded to her fond exertions, and she had the reward of drawing at last a smile from his eyes as well as from his lips. The last she knew might be simulated, the former she felt was real, ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... night," says Mason, "the moon did not show itself, and the heavens, always more sombre when regarded from great altitudes, seemed to us to intensify the natural darkness. On the other hand, by a singular contrast, the stars shone out with unusual brilliancy, and seemed like living sparks sown upon the ebony vault ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... city of Mons, which they resolved to besiege with all possible expedition. They passed the Schelde on the third day of September, and detached the prince of Hesse to attack the French lines from the Haisne to the Sombre, which were abandoned at his approach. On the seventh day of September, mareschal de Boufflers arrived in the French camp at Quievrain, content to act in an inferior capacity to Villars, although his superior in point ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... The autumn scene, though sombre and sad, was far from depressing, but they all felt the change. John Hislop seemed to feel it more than all the rest; for besides being deeply religious, he was deeply in love. His nearest and dearest friend, Heney—happy, hilarious ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman
... nature of the enterprise they had undertaken, to indulge in general conversation. Gradually, however, the steady rapid motion, the sense of strength and reliance in themselves and each other, lessened the sombre expression, and a general talk began, mostly upon Indian fights, in which most of the older settlers had at one time or ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty
... we made our bed of some branches we lopped off from the trees, and which we joined together on the very moist soil in the interior of the vast forest, and there we slept soundly till the morrow, without fear, and particularly without having any sombre or disagreeable dreams. At the dawn of day we were on foot again, all Nature seeming to wake up with ourselves. Oh! how fine and calm did she appear to us! The vapours that arose from her breast covered ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere
... unconscious, she did not know, when, considerably later, she roused herself from what seemed like a heavy and unrefreshing sleep. Her dress was damp with dew, the sun had sunk so low as to fill the forest with a sombre shade; the happy life that had sported around her was hushed and hidden, and the wind now sighed mournfully through the trees. Gloom and darkening shadows had taken the place of the light and joyousness ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... is but the grouping of a few brilliant or sombre tableaux, which are like the famous lines in an epic that immortalize the whole. Maud's life was such a one, and her years had been rather unpicturesque until now, when the shadows began to deepen ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... filled up in the more elaborate, and, in many respects, most exquisite, poem of "Resignation." Virtue exacting all sacrifices, and giving no reward—Belief which denies enjoyment, and has no bliss save its own illusions; such is the sombre lesson of the melancholy poet—the more impressive because so far it is truth—deep and everlasting truth—but only, to a Christian, a part of truth. Resignation, so sad if not looking beyond the earth, becomes joy, when assured and confident of heaven. Another ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... the presence of death. Everywhere within the building were the evidences of a great sorrow. Crape was seen wherever the eye turned—surrounding the galleries, fronting the platform, encircling the choir. But there was one spot thrown into alto relievo by the sombre drapery of woe. In front of the pulpit, on a small table, were the exquisitely beautiful floral tributes of friendship and affection, whispering of the beauty and glory of that spring-time of the human race, when this "mortal shall ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... impartial verdict than Eyre was competent to do. Eyre, be it remembered, was struggling on for his life, Forrest travelled in comparative ease, being able to supply himself three times from the schooner during the journey; it is but natural that Eyre's report should bear a very sombre tinge. ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... sanction of my honour, however much it enlisted the approbation of my feelings. Some further time passed, and added, with its passing minutes, to my mental disquietude. One evening, when I was sitting meditating painfully on this sombre subject, a lackey, superbly dressed, was introduced to me by my servant, and stated that he had been commanded by his master Colonel P——, to request my attendance at his house without delay. I started at the mention of the name, and the nature of the message; and the man stared at me, as ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... time had one or more coats of light delicate green paint—the worst colour which could be chosen for endurance—put upon them, and many are now curiously black at the rear, through people leaning back against them. A glance round shows the various sombre places, and their relative darkness gives a fair clue as to the extent ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... bringing news—great news and glorious. A big naval battle had been fought in the North Sea! Ten British battleships had been sunk, but the whole German fleet had been destroyed! For the first time war took on some colour. Crimson and purple and gold began to shoot through the sombre black and grey. A completely new set of emotions filled their hearts, a new sense of exultation, a new pride in that great British Navy which hitherto had been a mere word in a history book, or in a song. The children who, after their manner, were quickest ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... It was not difficult for him to distinguish between the races, for Rais Ali had already told him that none but Turks were permitted to wear the turban, not even the sons of Turks by Algerine mothers, and that the Jews were by law commanded to dress in sombre black. ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne
... by the army of the Sombre-et-Meuse in 1796, and by Bagration in 1812, were secondary lines, as the former were merely secondary to the army of the Rhine, and the latter to ...
— Elements of Military Art and Science • Henry Wager Halleck
... his reverie, he stood opposite to that wild and magnificent gloom of Nature which frowned on him from the canvas, the very leaves on those gnome-like, distorted trees seemed to rustle sibylline secrets in his ear. Those rugged and sombre Apennines, the cataract that dashed between, suited, more than the actual scenes would have done, the mood and temper of his mind. The stern, uncouth forms at rest on the crags below, and dwarfed by the giant size of the Matter that reigned around them, impressed ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Breathing their silent farewells, as they fade and wither and perish, Soon to be thrown away as is the heart of the giver." So through the Plymouth woods John Alden went on his errand; Came to an open space, and saw the disk of the ocean, Sailless, sombre and cold with the comfortless breath of the east-wind; Saw the new-built house and people at work in a meadow; Heard, as he drew near the door, the musical voice of Priscilla Singing the hundredth Psalm, the grand old Puritan anthem, Music that Luther sang to the sacred words of the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... recall the form of that happiness. I wanted to play it all over again—in my nursery—by myself. No! All I remember is the happiness and two dear playfellows who were most with me . . . . Then presently came a sombre dark woman, with a grave, pale face and dreamy eyes, a sombre woman wearing a soft long robe of pale purple, who carried a book and beckoned and took me aside with her into a gallery above a hall—though my playmates were loth to have me go, and ceased their game ...
— The Door in the Wall And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... be up now, but we cannot see it for the hills and buildings. My goodness, see that!" and the Englishman pointed to the east. A flood of delicate pink light was now pouring into the vast body of gray and was slowly driving the more sombre color toward the west. The line of separation was marked—so marked, indeed, that it seemed a vast, rose-colored billow rolling, widening and sweeping onward like a swell of the ocean shoreward. On it came rapidly, till the whole landscape was magically changed. The flowers, the trees, the ...
— The Land of the Changing Sun • William N. Harben
... color, I usually choose red for books which come to binding or rebinding, for these reasons. The bulk of every library is of dark and sombre color, being composed of the old-fashioned calf bindings, which grow darker with age, mingled with the cloth bindings of our own day, in which dark colors predominate. Now the intermixture of red morocco, in all or most of the newly bound books, relieves the monotony of so much blackness, ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... been adapted to reassure her or console her. The state of suspense in which she now was did not give her any fresh strength. Her nervous system was disorganized, and her present position stimulated her morbid fancy, turning it toward dark and sombre forebodings. And now in this solitude and gloom which was about her, and in the deep suspense in which she was waiting, there came to her mind a thought—a thought which made her flesh creep, and ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... but from caprice and ill-humour. This subsequently became very evident, when we set out to take a walk, and Frederica joining Charlotte, with whom I was talking, the worthy gentleman's face, which was naturally rather sombre, became so dark and angry that Charlotte was obliged to touch my arm, and remind me that I was talking too much to Frederica. Nothing distresses me more than to see men torment each other; particularly ...
— The Sorrows of Young Werther • J.W. von Goethe
... helpless despair of a man on a spar who watches the lifeboat put off with its last load for the shore. The young ladies, almost before nurse was gone, began to run along the rows of chairs, falling down once in twelve, and rapidly toning down the pretty pink of their frocks to a sombre brick hue. I was thankful when the crowd began to drop in, and I was able, by threats of taking them home before the races began, to reduce them at least to the nine seats for which I was responsible. How I wished I had some ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... still glanced. Weeds, too, had crept up around them in picturesque toils, weeds which had started to destroy, but remained to adorn with all the sweet abandon of unrestrained growth. Some of them had put forth brilliant blossoms of many hues, little spots of exquisite coloring against the sombre hue of the stonework and the deep green of the leaves. Everywhere nature had triumphed over science and skill. Everything was changed, and nature had shown herself a more perfect gardener than man. The gravel paths were embedded ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... half-shrinking, timid look upon their sombre countenances, but they came close up, lowered down the bucks at Mark's feet, slipped out the spears, and then turned and fled, plunging in amongst the bushes, and then under the pendant boughs of the outer lines of the ...
— Dead Man's Land - Being the Voyage to Zimbambangwe of certain and uncertain • George Manville Fenn
... November—and the Glen is all grey and brown, except where the Lombardy poplars stand up here and there like great golden torches in the sombre landscape, although every other tree has shed its leaves. It has been very hard to keep our courage alight of late. The Caporetto disaster is a dreadful thing and not even Susan can extract much consolation out of the present state of affairs. The rest of us don't ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Caesar could mount in case of surprise or attack: before him and behind, both right and left, marched his army, their arms in rest, but without beating of drums or blowing of trumpets: this gave a sombre, funereal air to the whole procession, which at the gate of the city met Prospero Colonna awaiting it with ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... sang the wondrous song of the shaping of the earth. And all who heard were charmed with the sweet sound and with the pleasant words. He sang of the sunlight and the south winds and the summer-time, of the storms and the snow and the sombre shadows of the North-land. And he sang of the dead Ymir, the giant whose flesh had made the solid earth, and whose blood the sea, and whose bones the mountains, whose teeth the cliffs and crags, and whose skull the heavens. ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... it," said Kate. "I care nothing for a grand house. I should only be afraid of it. I know it is dark and sombre, for you have said so. Oh, Fred, any place will be Paradise to me, if I am ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... expense; you can do nothing much worth doing, in this world, without trouble, you can get nothing much worth having without expense. The main question is only—what is worth doing and having:—Consider, therefore, if this be not. Here is your iron railing, as yet, an uneducated monster; a sombre seneschal, incapable of any words, except his perpetual "Keep out!" and "Away with you!" Would it not be worth some trouble and cost to turn this ungainly ruffian porter into a well-educated servant; who, while he was severe as ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... in black, a sombre figure amidst the white muslins and rainbow sashes of her comrades. Her cashmere gown was of the simplest fashion, but it became the tall full figure to admiration. Below her linen collar she wore a scarlet ribbon, from which hung a silver locket, the only ornament she possessed. It was ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... Perkins, flushing faintly. "Each individuality gives out a spiritual vapour, like a cloud, which surrounds one. These are all in different colours, and the colours change with the thoughts we think. Black and purple are the gloomy, morose colours; deep blue and the paler shades show a sombre outlook on life; green is more cheerful, though still serious; yellow and orange show ambition and envy, and red and white are emblematic of all the virtues—red of the noble, martial qualities of man and white of the angelic disposition of woman," ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... of a very old song, and his heart cried out at the thought. He heaped more wood on the blaze from the little pile collected, and soon a roaring, boisterous fire burned in the glen, while giant shadows danced on the sombre hills. Then he rummaged in the tent till he found the rifles, carefully cleaned and laid aside. He selected two express 400 bores, a Metford express and a smooth-bore Winchester repeater. Then he filled his pockets with cartridges, and from a small ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... wound and twisted its firm white line amidst broken patches of snow and timber far away to either hand, and, where glacial affluents discharged into it, were finer, threadlike lines that marked the many mouths. The thick spruce mantling the slope in the foreground gave a sombre contrast to the fields of snow, and the yellow March sunshine was poured over all the wide landscape save where the great clouds ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... "A sombre thought, but I guess you're right. A fellow couldn't swim far or stick it out long in there," said Shad, waving his arm toward the dark waters. "I'm sure I owe my life to you. It was lucky ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace
... at the inn, and prepared to return. It was at the latter end of the month of May, and nature was adorned in the bridal ornaments of spring; the sun was sunk behind the groves, which cast their sombre shades over the valley, while the retiring beams of day adorned the distant eastern eminences with ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.
... stood silent, full of bitter thoughts, rapidly but minutely reviewing the whole of his past life. When he removed his hands he started, and a thrill passed over him, for he suddenly encountered the gaze of two piercing eyes glittering with a sombre lustre, and seeming to watch and enjoy his despair. A second glance showed him they belonged to the strange portrait which he had bought, many years before, in the Stchukin Dvor. It had remained forgotten and concealed amidst a mass of old pictures, and he had long since forgotten ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... mountains, on the barren tops of rocky passes, where the soul has seemed to hear in solitude a low controlling voice. It is almost necessary for the development of our deepest affections that some sad and sombre moments should be interchanged with hours of merriment and elasticity. It is this variety in the woof of daily life which endears our home to us; and perhaps none have fully loved the Alps who have not spent some days ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... Next after them they came to Corcyra, where Poseidon settled the daughter of Asopus, fair-haired Corcyra, far from the land of Phlius, whence he had carried her off through love; and sailors beholding it from the sea, all black with its sombre woods, call it Corcyra the Black. And next they passed Melite, rejoicing in the soft-blowing breeze, and steep Cerossus, and Nymphaea at a distance, where lady Calypso, daughter of Atlas, dwelt; and they deemed they ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... mountains, in whose mist or sunshine he had ridden for two days. The woods, with leaves that fell continually about him, seemed in some swoon of nature, with no birds carolling on the boughs; the cloisters were monastic in their silence. A season of most dolorous influences, a land of sombre shadows and ravines, a day of sinister solitude; the sun slid through scudding clouds, high over a world blown upon by salt airs brisk and tonic, but man was wanting in those weary valleys, and the heart of Victor Jean, ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... blue-black, dyed with indigo; some are glazed with gum. Many, however, are white, and ornamented in front about the neck with silken embroidery,—a costume which gives them a very chaste and elegant appearance. Sometimes the tobes are variegated in colour, as are the trousers; but the sombre, or pure white, are ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... from their sight. The meagre pleasures which we allowed ourselves—sympathizing looks, words spoken in whispers not to wake the count, hopes and fears repeated and again repeated, in short, the thousand incidents of the fusion of two hearts long separated—stand out in bright array upon the sombre background of the actual scene. Our souls knew each other to their depths under this test, which many a warm affection is unable to bear, finding life too heavy or too flimsy in the ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... they all met,—the father, the three children, and Mrs. Finn. How far the young people among themselves had been able to throw off something of the gloom of death need not here be asked; but in the presence of their father they were sad and sombre, almost as he was. On the next day, early in the morning, the younger lad returned to his college, and Lord Silverbridge went up to London, where he was supposed to have ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... hand on his arm and gazed, with round-eyed simplicity, into his sombre countenance. For an instant her witchery ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable
... strike organisations by the law, will avert this gathering storm? The Spectacle of Pleasure, the parade of clothes, estates, motor-cars, luxury and vanity in the sight of the workers is the culminating irritant of Labour. So long as that goes on, this sombre resolve to which we are all awakening, this sombre resolve rather to wreck the whole fabric than to continue patiently at work, will gather strength. It does not matter that such a resolve is hopeless and unseasonable; we are dealing here with the profounder impulses that underlie ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... flash of sombre glare With yellow tinged the forest's brown; Up rose the Wildgrave's bristling hair, And horror ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... few truffles—probably there was but little beef—for Goldsmith during this sombre period. "His threadbare coat, his uncouth figure, and Hibernian dialect caused him to meet with repeated refusals." But at length he got some employment in a chemist's shop, and this was a start. Then he tried practising in ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... modest-sized country gentleman's residence, built of variegated uneven stones, black and grey and white, which seemed to be chiefly flint; but the corners and settings of the windows and of the door-ways, and the chimneys, were of brick. There was something sombre about it, and many perhaps might call it dull of aspect; but it was substantial, comfortable, and unassuming. It was entered by broad stone steps, with iron balustrades curving outwards as they descended, and there was an open area round the house, showing that ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... as he went down into L'Houmeau; and when he took his way towards Marsac, with the last sombre thoughts gnawing at his heart, it was with the firm resolve to hide his death. There should be no inquest held over him, he would not be laid in earth; no one should see him in the hideous condition of the corpse that floats on the surface of the water. Before long he reached one of the slopes, ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... moral of which has little that can peculiarly recommend it. To exhibit the repentance of a lovely but erring woman, to show us how her soul may be restored to its primitive nobleness, by sufferings, devotion and death, is the object of Maria Stuart. It is a tragedy of sombre and mournful feelings; with an air of melancholy and obstruction pervading it; a looking backward on objects of remorse, around on imprisonment, and forward on the grave. Its object is undoubtedly attained. We are forced to pardon and to love the heroine; she is beautiful, and ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... appealed mournfully to the heart; the doctor, in presence of these touching regrets, felt his eyes fill with tears. At the very same place which Franklin and his companions passed full of energy and hope, there only remained a block of marble in remembrance! And notwithstanding this sombre warning of destiny, the Forward was going to follow in the track of the Erebus and the Terror. Hatteras was the first to rouse himself from the perilous contemplation, and quickly climbed a rather steep hill, almost entirely ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... served to whet curiosity, and the young scholars of the day applied themselves to Arabic in order to equip their minds, and to be in a more blissful state of preparation for the triumphant edition to follow. Captain Burton's first volume in sombre black and dazzling gold—the livery of the Abbasides—made its appearance three weeks ago, and divided attention with the newly-discovered Star. It is the first volume of ten, the set issued solely to subscribers. And already, as ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... were skimming up overhead from the placid surface of the Yukon, and robins were singing. The oblique rays of the hidden sun shot through the smoke, high-dissipated from forest fires a thousand miles away, and turned the heavens to sombre red, while the earth shone red in the reflected glow. This red glow shone in the faces of all, and made everything seem ...
— Lost Face • Jack London
... of our own compatriots. These folks take their kef, as they do every thing else, quietly. Here you may see hundreds of revellers, and not a drunkard among them. Perhaps the repose of the scene draws some of its influence from those sombre burying grounds, of which two are just opposite. No where is such truth of funereal effect preserved as in this country. Pere la Chaise, and all European cemeteries are puerile in comparison. The stately evergreen which they have consecrated to the overshadowing of the dead fulfils ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... and a deathlike silence reigns through the forest, which is only now and then interrupted by the rattle of the rattlesnake (like a clock going down), and the chirrup of the chitnunck, or squirrel. The sombre colour of the foliage, the absence of all sun even at mid-day, and the vault-like chilliness one feels when entering a cypress swamp, is far from cheering; and I don't know any position so likely to give one the horrors as being lost in ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 460 - Volume 18, New Series, October 23, 1852 • Various
... it otherwise, the Failure would not lead to Despair. You know me too well to think it is Love; & I have had no quarrel or dissention with Friend or enemy, you may therefore be easy, since no unpleasant consequence will be produced from the present Sombre cast of my Temper. I fear the Business will not be concluded before your arrival in Town, when we will settle it together, as by the 20th these sordid Bloodsuckers who have agreed to furnish the Sum, will have drawn up the Bond. Believe me, my dearest Sister, ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... When their mother or Tom was with them, they would often linger until the stars came out or the moon rose. How glorious the water looked then, bathed in silvery radiance, like an enchanted lake! How dark and sombre the woods! What strange shadows used to lurk among the trees! Hatty would creep to Bessie's side, as they walked, especially if Tom indulged in ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... in an earlier stratum of his life than its predecessor. There is little here to recall the characteristic moods of his first years of desolate widowhood—the valiant Stoicism, the acceptance of the sombre present, the great forward gaze upon the world beyond. We are in Italy once more, our senses tingle with its glowing prodigality of day, we jostle the teeming throng of the Roman streets, and are drawn into the vortex of a vast debate ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... month of October 1880 that, in the course of his enterprise, Doctor Bataille reached Calcutta. Freemasonry, he informs us, invariably affects the horrible, and as he invests Calcutta with the sombre hues of living death and universal putrefaction, it naturally follows that the Indian city is one of the four great directing centres of Universal Freemasonry. Everywhere the pious Doctor discovered the hand of Lucifer; everywhere he beheld the consequences of superstition ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... in thin, floating white dresses and spangled veils, hurrying by like ghosts in the dark. Heavy silver ornaments jangled on their ankles, above their black slippers splashed with mud. Their sombre eyes stared out from circles of Kohl, and, with stained, claret-coloured hands, whose nails were bright red, they clasped their light and bridal raiment to their prominent breasts. They were escorted by a gigantic man, almost black, with a zigzag scar across the left side of his face, who wore ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... light, remarks that the rays prevent us from seizing the outline of a bright object, that then the flame is enveloped by a bright halo; then by a second one less vivid, and so on until the tones become dull and sombre. In short, to make myself understood, his picture seen from distance ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... repeated. "All combinations of sounds convey a sense of colour to the mind. Gregorians are obviously of a rich and sombre brown, just as a Salvation Army hymn ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... in the small room, so dimly lighted, holding the long, snake-like pipe-stem in his thin, artistic hands, he looked like an Eastern Jew. With a fez upon his head, Europe would have dropped from him. Even his expression seemed to have become wholly Eastern, in its sombre, glittering intelligence, and in the patience of ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... you?" exclaimed Black, a gleam of joy lighting up his sombre visage. "Eh, but I am gled to ...
— Hunted and Harried • R.M. Ballantyne
... looking so prosperous and solid. It was not only the flesh that he had put on, but also the clothes, that made him hard to recognise. In the old days, an imitation fur coat had seemed to be as integral a part of him as were his ill-shorn lantern jaws. But now his costume was a model of rich and sombre moderation, drawing, not calling, attention to itself. He looked like a banker. Any one would have been proud to be seen off ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... silence, through many dark and intricate passages in my progress to the studio of his master. Much that I encountered on the way contributed, I know not how, to heighten the vague sentiments of which I have already spoken. While the objects around me—while the carvings of the ceilings, the sombre tapestries of the walls, the ebon blackness of the floors, and the phantasmagoric armorial trophies which rattled as I strode, were but matters to which, or to such as which, I had been accustomed from my infancy—while I ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... his unnatural fit had passed away. He stretched out his hand and struck a silver gong which had been left within his reach. Almost immediately a man, pale-faced, with full dark eyes and olive complexion, dressed in the sombre garb of an indoor servant, stood at ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... name of "Egdon Heath," which has been given to the sombre scene of the story, are united or typified heaths of various real names, to the number of at least a dozen; these being virtually one in character and aspect, though their original unity, or partial unity, is now somewhat disguised by intrusive strips and slices brought under the plough with varying ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... of giving offence, Elizabeth had written to ask if it was the queen's pleasure that she should appear in mourning; but the queen would have no mourning, nor would have others wear it in her presence. The sombre colours which of late years had clouded the court were to be banished at once and for ever; and with the dark colours, it seemed for a time as if old dislikes and suspicions were at the same time to pass away. The sisters embraced; the queen was warm and affectionate, kissing ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... take "Sombre Foret," of "William Tell," in case I should be asked. Therefore I said that I had brought "Sombre Foret," and if he liked ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... and very black, and very grave, as Darry was also. There was Jem, full of life and waggishness, and bright for any exercise of his wits; and grave shadows used to come over his changeable face often enough too. There was Margaret, with her sombre beauty; and old Theresa with her worn old face. I think there was a certain indescribable reserve of gravity upon them all, but there was not one whose lips did not part in a white line when looking at me, nor whose eyes and ears did not watch ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... the little old man had evidently crept behind a long line of people who were listening attentively to Marianina's voice as she finished the cavatina from Tancred. He seemed to have come up through the floor, impelled by some stage mechanism. He stood for a moment motionless and sombre, watching the festivities, a murmur of which had perhaps reached his ears. His almost somnambulistic preoccupation was so concentrated upon things that, although he was in the midst of many people, he saw nobody. He ...
— Sarrasine • Honore de Balzac
... for a moment with drooping head, amid the sombre shadows, then, slowly, she drew the emblazoned morocco case ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... upon whom the sombre-robed, grim-visaged stranger did not make a favorable impression, broke from his hold and took refuge in the skirts of the Countess, as the ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... the common, James knew a wood of tall fir trees, dark and ragged, their sombre green veiled in a silvery mist, as though, like a chill vapour, the hoar-frost of a hundred winters still lingered among their branches. At the edge of the hill, up which they climbed in serried hundreds, stood here and there an oak tree, just bursting ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... dreary, and after passing Cruz Blanca, excepting occasional cornfields and sombre pine-forests, the scene had no objects of interest sufficient to enable us to keep our eyes open. The sun was set—it grew dusk, and by the time we reached Perote, where we were to pass the night, most of us had fallen into an uncomfortable sleep, very ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... there, without rest, till he be consumed. Human strength, never so Herculean, has its measure. Herald shadows flit pale across the fire-brain of Mirabeau; heralds of the pale repose. While he tosses and storms, straining every nerve, in that sea of ambition and confusion, there comes, sombre and still, a monition that for him the issue of it ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... just like old Pluto, Persephone's prigger; You'll follow Apollo the Younger—that's me! He's sombre as Styx, and as black as a nigger. His lady-love, LONDON! ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, November 15, 1890 • Various
... the ninth hour and the shadows of evening were already drawing in very fast. A tall figure dressed in sombre garments walked slowly up the hill ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... finally found the way. By turning the pen over and writing with the back of the point, the upward strokes emerged fine and hair-like. This having somewhat altered the mechanism of the pen point, its reversal brought lines sombre and heavy. It was slow and laborious, and it spoiled an alarming number of pen points; but then it achieved fine lines upward and heavy lines downward, and that is ...
— Emmy Lou - Her Book and Heart • George Madden Martin
... governess. Hence the year 1843 was passed by her at the Pensionnat Heger in that capacity, and in this period she undoubtedly widened her intellectual sphere by reading the many books in French literature that her friend M. Heger lent her. But life took on a very sombre shade in the lonely environment in which she found herself. She became so depressed that on one occasion she took refuge in the confessional precisely as did her heroine Lucy Snowe in Villette. In 1844 she returned to her father's house at Haworth, and the three ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... Vast, lofty, sombre; the walls hung with dark-green tapestry—a pattern of vertical stripes, dark green and darker green; here and there a great dark painting, a Crucifixion, a Holy Family, in a massive dim-gold frame; dark-hued ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... red trousers, fastened round his ankles by broad rings of gilt brass. His long caftan of black cloth, embroidered with scarlet and gold, was bound round his waist and wrist by other large rings of gilt metal. This sombre costume imparted to him an aspect still more ferocious. His thick and red-haired beard fell in large quantities down to his chest, and a long piece of white muslin was folded round his red head. A devout missionary in Germany ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... in his mind, it cost him an effort to piece in his awakening and to revive the meditative interval of the Silent Rooms. At first his memory leapt these things and took him back to the cascade at Pentargen quivering in the wind, and all the sombre splendours of the sunlit Cornish coast. The contrast touched everything with unreality. And then the gap filled, and he began to ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... broad shouldered man, reddish haired and ruddy cheeked, with cool grey eyes; his sandy mustache was closely cropped and turned up ever so slightly at the corners of his mouth. Despite his colouring, his face was somewhat sombre—even stern—when in repose. It was his fine, enveloping smile that made friends for him wherever he listed, with men and with women. More frequently than otherwise it made more ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... the back of the chair he slung his girdle and the scabbard hanging therefrom and placed his plumed hat so that none could see that his Castilian blade was not in its resting-place. And when the sombre chamber had the appearance of one having undressed in it before retiring Rodriguez turned his attention to the bed, which he noticed to be of great depth and softness. That something not unlike blood had been ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... Excitement was carried to such a point that in many places the people complained that they were not permitted to arm against the French. The Austrian generals industriously circulated the most sinister reports respecting the armies of the Sombre-et-Meuse and the Rhine, and the position of the French troops in the Tyrol. These impostures, printed in bulletins, were well calculated to instigate the Italians, and especially the Venetians, to rise in mass to exterminate the French, when the victorious army should ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... of a similar kind. It is a veritable chapter in morbid pathology, though it may have truly a beauty for experts, the beauty which belongs to all refined cases even of cerebral disturbance. That he should [79] have sought relief from his singular wretchedness, in that sombre company, is like the second stroke of tragedy upon him. At moments Pascal becomes almost a sectarian, and seems to pass out of the genial broad heaven of the Catholic Church. He had lent himself in those last years to a kind of pieties which do not make a winning ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... is the place for Marie now; indeed, dear girl, she knew that well herself. The Marquis pressed her hard to stay, and I said nothing; but Marie insisted on coming home. I thought Henri looked somewhat more sombre than is his wont, as he was leading her down the steps: but he cannot, must not, think of love now, Victorine. La Vendee now wants ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... not touched upon. Marcus Clarke could never have shown the Australian people so much of the beauty of their strange fauna and flora as can be found in Geoffry Hamlyn. He would have allowed the budding civilisation of the country to be swallowed up in sombre desolate forests, or appear as lonely specks on bleached and thirsty plains. Though he might intend the contrary, that, substantially, would be the final impression left on the mind of the reader. Australian scenery awed and depressed him. With ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... nurse exclaimed, "Dr. Trip ain't in it." But the surgeon's face wore a preoccupied, sombre look, irresponsive to the nurse's admiration. While she helped the interne with the complicated dressing, the little nurse made ready for removal to the ward. Then when one of the ward tenders had wheeled the muffled figure into the corridor, she ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... not sombre and sedate as is our Upper House, but simplicity itself—no gilded throne, no Lord Chancellor in wig and gown, no offensive officialism. It looks like a huge auction room, the auctioneer being the ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... to pass during the fifth month of the year 1665, that a great terror fell upon the city of London; even as a sombre cloud darkens the midday sky. For it was whispered abroad a plague had come amongst the people, fears of which had been entertained, and signs of which had been obvious for some time. During the previous November a few persons had fallen victims ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... statues in the moonlit place cast long shadows athwart the pavement: but the fountain in the midst is dressed out like Cinderella for the night, and sings and wears a crest of diamonds. That great sombre street all in shade, can it be the famous Toledo?—or is it the Corso?—or is it the great street in Madrid, the one which leads to the Escurial where the Rubens and Velasquez are? It is Fancy Street—Poetry Street—Imagination Street—the street where lovely ladies look ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Elizabeth, the English nation became more and more a people of one book, and that book the Bible. As, deeply dyed with Calvinism, they read over and over its sacred pages, they became a serious, sombre, purposeful—and almost fanatic people. The faults and extravagances of the Puritan party and of the later Commonwealth do not at this time concern us. It is with their purposefulness, their determination to make the church a home of ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... firm step and an outward composure of manner. She was a blonde young lady, small, dainty, well gloved, and dressed in the most perfect taste. There was, however, a plainness and simplicity about her costume which bore with it a suggestion of limited means. The dress was a sombre grayish beige, untrimmed and unbraided, and she wore a small turban of the same dull hue, relieved only by a suspicion of white feather in the side. Her face had neither regularity of feature nor beauty of complexion, ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... beastly, NAN, that's wot it is. Wy, blimy, Narrer ill-lighted streets is our best friends. Yer dingy nooks and slums, sombre and slimy, Is gifts wot Prowidence most kyindly sends To give hus chaps a chance of perks and pickins; But if the Town's chock-full of "arc" and "glow," With you and me, NAN, it will play the dickens. We must turn 'onest, NAN, and ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 21, 1891 • Various
... was downright alarmed, and rang hastily for his people. He committed her to the charge of Mrs. Milton. It seemed cruel to demand any further explanation from her just then; so brave a girl, who had gone so far with him, would be sure to tell him sooner or later. Meantime he sat sombre and agitated, oppressed by a strange sense of awe and mystery, and vague misgiving. While he brooded thus, a footman brought him in a card upon a salver: "The Reverend Alleyn Meredith." "Do I know this ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... the habit of putting on a rich golden tinge, which became them both wonderfully. The upper windows of the great house flamed so as to make your eyes wink; the little river ran off noisily westward and was lost in sombre wood, behind which the towers of the old abbey church of Clavering (whereby that town is called Clavering St. Mary's to the present day) rose up in purple splendour. Little Arthur's figure and his mother's cast long blue shadows over ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... succeeded each other in Western Asia annihilated all the hopes of the Jewish race for a terrestial kingdom, and cast it back on religious dreams, which it cherished with a kind of sombre passion. The establishment of the Roman empire exalted men's imaginations, and the great era of peace on which the world was entering gave birth to illimitable hopes. This confused medley of dreams found at ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... Taking our departure from the town on the following morning, we observed that the fog, covering the surrounding landscape with a thick, impenetrable veil, increased in density until it seemed as if from moment to moment additional tints of sombre gray were united to the haze. In fact, after a while we were unable to discern the outline of the coast, having to pursue our way ...
— By Water to the Columbian Exposition • Johanna S. Wisthaler
... but the lighthouse gleam over his head faintly outlined the swells, as one by one they tossed their spray up to where he stood; back of him the welcome glow of Uncle Terry's home, and all around the wide ocean, dark and sombre. What a change from the busy hive of men he had left that morning! Only a brief space was he left to contemplate it, when he heard a voice ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn
... youth. When he sprang upon the table and sang his old camp-song, "The Drum," he looked the boy they remembered at Valley Forge and Morristown. There was only one member of the company who was unelectrified by the gay abandon of the evening, and his sombre appearance was so marked in contrast that it was widely commented on afterward. Burr frequently leaned forward and stared at Hamilton in amazement. As the hilarity waxed, his taciturnity deepened, ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... stood around and looked at him with jaws that were drooping helplessly. The air seemed laden with a sombre uncertainty that had not yet succeeded in penetrating the nature ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon
... spoke I became suddenly aware that the gas-lights were paling, and glancing towards the window on my left I saw the splendour of the sunrise breaking fresh and clear over the city of diabolical night, where in the sombre eastern sky— ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... up, and had breakfasted; after this there was nearly a whole tedious hour to endure whilst the horses were laden by torch-light; but this had an end, and at last we went on once more. Cloaked, and sombre, at first we made our sullen way through the darkness, with scarcely one barter of words, but soon the genial morn burst down from heaven, and stirred the blood so gladly through our veins, that the very Suridgees, with all their troubles, could now look up for an instant, and almost seem to believe ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... grated on the women's nerves as he talked loudly and incessantly, and they listened. Maria kept her face hidden in her hands, but Gemma held herself erect as ever, and she did not move when the two girls came in, though her sombre eyes were full ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... for more than a year, and in her sombre trailing weeds was a wonder to behold. She lived in her father's house, and saw no company, but sat or walked and drove with her sister Anne, and visited the poor. The perfect stateliness of her decorum was more talked about than any levity would have been; those who ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... as he looked earnestly at the house round which these memories hung. Standing on an angle formed by the bending river, and the little creek, and behind a screen of trees—elms almost too old to feel the sap of spring, a chestnut or two, and a few laurels and sombre firs, that had cracked with their roots the grey garden wall and sprawled down to the beach below—the stained and yellow frontage looked down towards the busy harbour, as it seemed with a sense of serene decay, haunted but without disquietude, ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... darkness thick and heavy brooded over the settlement. The sombre pines encompassing the village seemed to close threateningly about it as if to reclaim the wilderness that had been wrested from them. A low rustling as of dead leaves, and the damp breath of forest odors filled the lonely street. Emboldened by the darkness ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... entre ses mains puissantes. Il fait que tout prospre aux mes innocentes, Tandis qu'en ses projets l'orgueilleux est tromp. De mes faibles attraits le Roi parut frapp. 70 Il m'observa longtemps dans un sombre silence; Et le Ciel, qui pour moi fit pencher la balance, Dans ce temps-l sans doute agissait sur son coeur. Enfin, avec des yeux o rgnait la douceur: Soyez reine, dit-il; et ds ce moment mme 75 De sa main sur mon ...
— Esther • Jean Racine
... glance they might have been mistaken for mother and daughter, as the elder woman was clad in a sombre black velvet dress, and had a pale, thin face, crowned with heavy masses of grey hair. On closer inspection, however, one perceived that Julia Lester was far from old—indeed, not more than about forty-five, and with a peculiarly gentle, almost child-like expression, which ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... been told by every generation, handed down by grandames at the fireside, narrated night and day, and the chronicle has changed its complexion somewhat in every age. Like some great building that has suffered many modifications of successive generations of architects, some sombre weather-beaten pile, the delight of a poet, the story would drive the commentator and the industrious winnower of words, facts, and dates to despair. The narrator believes in it, as all superstitious minds in Flanders ...
— Christ in Flanders • Honore de Balzac
... night train down from Paris. Early in the morning I woke up to find myself in the gorges of the Alps, high peaks with romantic Italian-looking settings soaring on every side. At noon we reached Lake Geneva, lying slate-coloured and sombre beneath a wintry sky. That afternoon I saw ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... n'ai pas besoin de ta lueur, car je connais ma route! Elle a pu me paraitre sombre au dbut, quand mes yeux n'taient point accoutums ses rudes contours; mais, depuis un an, elle est pour moi blouissante de clart. On a beau me l'allonger chaque jour, on n'arrivera pas me l'obscurcir. On a beau y multiplier les ronces et les pierres, aprs lesquelles ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... Rab continued to feel a sense of depression, sadness and anxiety; during his walks with the medical student he was "sombre and mild; declined doing battle—submitted to ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... Gregorian," Mr. Amarinth repeated. "All combinations of sounds convey a sense of colour to the mind. Gregorians are obviously of a rich and sombre brown, just as a Salvation Army hymn is a ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... drop it," put in his brother-in-law. "I've lost my coin and that's the end of it. I don't intend to have the evening spoiled for a thing like that. Music! ladies, music and a jolly air! No more dumps." And with as hearty a laugh as he could command in face of the sombre looks he encountered on every side, he led the ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... sat alone there in the small room, so dimly lighted, holding the long, snake-like pipe-stem in his thin, artistic hands, he looked like an Eastern Jew. With a fez upon his head, Europe would have dropped from him. Even his expression seemed to have become wholly Eastern, in its sombre, glittering intelligence, and in the patience ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... Paglia) and contemplated the Bridge of Sighs. Because one does not stand on the Bridge of Sighs but in it, for it is merely dark passages lit by gratings. But to stand on the Ponte di Paglia on the Riva and gaze up the sombre Rio del Palazzo with the famous arch poised high over it is one of the first duties of all visitors to Venice and ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... thing, as Milly knew he would, and turned out a creditable imitation of a Paris shop, with stucco marbles, black woodwork, and glass everywhere, even to red plush sofas along the walls and a row of little tables and chairs in front. It had a very gay appearance—"distinguished" in its sombre setting. "No one could help walking in to buy a cake, could ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... a higher order, stood Like an extinct volcano in his mood; 140 Silent, and sad, and savage,—with the trace Of passion reeking from his clouded face; Till lifting up again his sombre eye, It glanced on Torquil, who leaned faintly by. "And is it thus?" he cried, "unhappy boy! And thee, too, thee—my madness must destroy!" He said, and strode to where young Torquil stood, Yet dabbled with ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... into a stately room packed with masterpieces of art; gleaming marbles and sombre bronze in groups of bewildering beauty, with every inch of wall-space crowded with canvases in massive gold frames glowing with the soft radiance of concealed ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... was a certain sombre satisfaction in reflecting that her traits of frailty should call forth such enthrallingly sinister comments. "Lets any wild enthusiasm carry her off her feet"—"before, it's too ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... the Apostle's long demonstration that the Gospel is the revelation of 'the righteousness of God from faith to faith,' and is thereby 'the power of God unto salvation.' What a contrast there is between the beginning and the end of his argument! It started with sombre, sad words about man's sinfulness and aversion from the knowledge of God. It closes with this sunny outburst of triumph; like some stream rising among black and barren cliffs, or melancholy moorlands, and foaming ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... Claire Lepage's account of him, and Sylvia's, also I had seen pictures of him in the newspapers, and had studied them with some care, trying to imagine what sort of personage he might be. I knew that he was twenty-four, but the man who came towards us I would have taken to be forty. His face was sombre, with large features and strongly marked lines about the mouth; he was tall and thin, and moved with decision, betraying no emotion even in this moment of surprise. "What are you doing here?" ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... pre-eminent as the leading timber tree of the Western Australian forests. For constructive work necessitating contact with soil and water jarrahwood has no native equal. A jarrah forest is dull, sombre, and uninteresting to the eye. In first-class forests the trees attain a height of from 90 ft. to 120 ft., with good stems 3 ft. to 5 ft. in diameter. The tree is practically confined to the south-western division of the colony, where the heaviest rains of the season fall. ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... thoughtfully graduated to indicate the time which had elapsed since Sir Timothy's decease. She wore a violet silk of sombre hue, ornamented by a black silk apron and a black lace scarf. The velvet bow which served so very imperfectly as a skull-cap was also violet, intimating a semi-assuaged, but respectfully lengthened, ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... and association. For although the sullen tone of his mind was not fully brought out until he wrote Childe Harold, it is yet evident from his Hours of Idleness that he was tuned to that key before he went abroad. The dark colouring of his mind was plainly imbibed in a mountainous region, from sombre heaths, and in the midst of rudeness and grandeur. He had no taste for more cheerful images, and there are neither rural objects nor villagery in the scenes he describes, but only loneness ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... With the slap-dash economy of effort which he had learned of Van Roon, when that ill-fated genius was in Chelsea, Mac had caught the salient curves and angles of Mrs. Carville as she stooped over her scaldino, had caught to a surprising degree the sombre expression of her face and the tigerish energy of her crouched body. I studied it with great pleasure for a moment, and then it recurred to me that he had not been with us at the window. I say recurred, though I had known it all along, and my ejaculation, for that matter, ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... at the height of this engagement was sombre, magnificent, and unique. The day was perfectly clear, and you could see right down the coast as far as Sedd-ul-Bahr. There the warships of the first division were blazing away at Aki Baba and the hills around it, covering their summits with a great white cloud ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... on, the scenery became more solemn and awe-inspiring. Pines that looked very gloomy in the late afternoon mingled with the chestnuts, while black rocks, faintly flushed with heather towards the sky, reared their jagged outlines above the sombre foliage. All the while the water in the gorge moaned or roared. It was growing very dusk when the walls on either hand rose like ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... sat eyeing a beam of sombre city sunlight on the dusty carpet. She could only suppose that the offending "he" was Wilfrid; but, why he should be so, she could not guess: and how to plead for him, divided ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the lee rigging, handing their eyes to shield the wind and spray. Faint as yet against the sombre monotone of sea and sky, a long line of breaking water leapt to their gaze, then vanished, as the staggering barque drove to the trough; again—again; there could be no doubt. Breakers! On a ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... inspiration through the bright links of suggestion by which one art lends itself to another. The two great Polish poets, Nierncewicz and Mickiewicz (the latter the Dante of the Slavic race), exiles from their unhappy land, feed their sombre sorrow, and find in the wild, Oriental rhythms of the player only melancholy memories of the past. Perhaps Victor Hugo, Balzac, Lamartine, or the aged Chateaubriand, also drop in by-and-by, to recognize, in the music, echoes of the daring romanticism which they opposed to ...
— The Great German Composers • George T. Ferris
... the long passage which led from his quarters to the oak hall, whistling sotto voce a bar or two of the Schumann as he went; then his manner became sombre as he crossed the polished boards and entered the passage beyond which led to ...
— Roger Ingleton, Minor • Talbot Baines Reed
... placed at the end of the vault on tressels, and not in niches like the others. These it was necessary to remove, to form behind them the chamber in which they were ultimately to be deposited. Stephen, finding the place and proceedings in keeping with the sombre colours of his mind, waited ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... called by Europeans) measures from three to four feet from point to point of its extended wings, and some of them have been seen wanting but a few inches of five feet in the alar expanse. These sombre-looking creatures feed chiefly on ripe fruits, the guava, the plantain, and the rose-apple, and are abundant in all the maritime districts, especially at the season when the silk-cotton tree, the pulun-imbul,[3] is putting forth its flower-buds, of which they are singularly fond. By day they ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... station at Viazma, where I arrived one morning at sunrise, I had some twenty miles to drive, and as soon as I got clear of the little town I began my observations. What I saw around me seemed to contradict the sombre accounts I had received. The villages through which I passed had not at all the look of dilapidation and misery which I expected. On the contrary, the houses were larger and better constructed than they used to be, and each of them had a chimney! That latter fact ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... mature fall of the year clothes itself in gay colors, it is deemed an evidence of immaturity for women in the fall time of life to sport crimson and scarlet and orange. Sober grays (which mean old, mature), quiet brown, and even sombre blacks, are rather what are looked for. To dress young when people are old, deceives no one. There is a beauty of age as well as a beauty of youth. Those who live to be old have had their share of the former: why should they seek to deprive ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Twickenham; but as we have already said something of the charming and thoroughly English scenes which surround Sudbrook, we shall add nothing further upon that subject now—though the blossoming horse chestnuts and the sombre cedars of Richmond Park, the bright stretches of the Thames, and the quaint gateways and terraces of Ham House, the startled deer and the gorse-covered common, all picture themselves before our mind at the mention of those walks, and ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... grasped Simmons's hand, over which hung a fall of antique lace; "I have loved music all my days. It is an additional bond between us, sir. And the costume is quite in keeping with your art. How delightful it would be, my dear sir, if we could discard forever the sombre clothes of our day and go back to the velvets and silks Of ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... those left at the Hutted Knoll. They had built three or four skiffs, one small batteau, and a couple of canoes. These were all in the water, in waiting for the disappearance of the ice; which was now reduced to a mass of stalactites in form, greenish and sombre in hue, as they floated in a body, but clear and bright when separated and exposed to the sun. The south winds began to prevail, and the shore was glittering with the fast-melting piles of the frozen fluid, though it would have been vain yet to attempt ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... schools, is the most startling artistic apparition of his century. And to the century he has summed up so plastically and emotionally he has also propounded questions that only the unborn years may answer. He has a hundred faults to which he opposes one imperious excellence—a genius, sombre, magical, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... the condition of the willow boughs Oliver agreed as to the cause, and said that they must remember to warn the Baron's shepherds that the Bushmen, who had not been seen for some time, were about. Soon afterwards they emerged from the sombre firs and crossed a wide and sloping ground, almost bare of trees, where a forest fire last year had swept away the underwood. A verdant growth of grass was now springing up. Here they could canter side by side. The sunshine poured ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... gratified Pixie's keen sense of what it dramatically termed "a situation" to place herself in this point of vantage and act the part of audience; and to-day, though no one more interesting than a gardener was likely to appear, she yet made instinctively for the accustomed place. The sombre green of the yew was more in accord with her mood than the riot of blossom in the gardens beyond, and she was out of sight of those terrible upper windows. At any moment, as it seemed, a hand from within might stretch out to lower those blinds ... Could one live through ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... very unpalatable medicine, and the critic realized it as he looked at the sombre face ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... as the night was clear though cold, he threw His chamber door wide open[779]—and went forth Into a gallery of a sombre hue, Long, furnished with old pictures of great worth, Of knights and dames heroic and chaste too, As doubtless should be people of high birth; But by dim lights the portraits of the dead Have something ghastly, desolate, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... likely that the sombre satire of the pure and beautiful Jeanne-Marie Philipon touched the heart of Paris more than the shedding of tears and shrieking lamentations. The wife of Roland, led to the scaffold, faced with the stern certainty of death, asks with calm dignity for pen, ink, and paper, "so that she might write ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... beautiful, the worldly, the joyous. As he rose slowly to his feet, he looked half despairingly around. It was a stern religion which they loved, this handful of weatherbeaten farmers and their underlings. Their womenkind were made as unlovely as possible, with flat hair, sombre and ill-made clothes. Their surroundings were whitewashed and text-hung walls, and in their hearts was the love for narrow ways. He gave out his text slowly and with heavy heart. Then he paused, and, glancing once more round the little building, met again the soft, languid fire of those full ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... is a little stone sort of shed with two arched openings, and from it you look into the tiny church with its crucifixes and relics, or out to great, bold, sombre Martinswand, as you like best; and in this spot Findelkind would sit hour after hour while his brothers and sisters were playing, and look up at the mountains or on to the altar, and wish and pray and vex his little soul most woefully; and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... not write its events in detail. What I have already mentioned will do as a sample. Late in the afternoon—it was the afternoon of a September day, the first fine one after a three days' storm—we reached the cape, just as the short sombre twilight of an autumn day settled down on land and sea. As the horse trudged laboriously along through the heavy piece of sand connecting the cape and the mainland, I was almost terrified by the great sound of waves, whose spray tossed up in vast spouts from every rocky ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... universal sombre tint of desert animals is a beautiful example of the imperious working of our modern Deus ex machina, natural selection. The more uniform in hue is the environment of any particular region, the more uniform in hue must be all its inhabitants. In the arctic snows, for example, we find ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... great calm settled on Jeanne's face. The lamp cast a sunny light upon it, and it regained its exquisite though somewhat lengthy oval. Jeanne's fine eyes, now closed, had large, bluish, transparent lids, which veiled—one could divine it—a sombre, flashing glance. A light breathing came from her slender nose, while round her somewhat large mouth played a vague smile. She slept thus, amidst her outspread tresses, ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... up at the sombre roof, dropping a little way earthward from the sides. Mosses hung from the eaves. Not one sound of life came to me as I stood until the neighbor's boy was out of sight. I knocked then, a timid, tremulous knock,—for last night's fear was creeping over me. The noise startled ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... Where the sombre azimuths are booming, Flecked with argent elemental foam, And the stately colocynths are blooming In a salicylic monochrome; There, transported on pellucid pinions, Sick of common sense I seek repose, Far from the disconsolate dominions Tainted ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CL, April 26, 1916 • Various
... the background of the picture, you will perceive that it is already of a dusky, sombre hue; now, this being of a meditative and grave character, has been denominated by our academy the 'brown-study color'; and it would clearly have been supererogatory to lay the same tint upon it. No, sir; we avoid repetitions even in our prayers, deeming ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... children into whose existence the ceaseless round of fast and feast, of prohibited and enjoyed pleasures, of varying species of food, brought change and relief! Imprisoned in the area of a few narrow streets, unlovely and sombre, muddy and ill-smelling, immured in dreary houses and surrounded with mean and depressing sights and sounds, the spirit of childhood took radiance and color from its own inner light and the alchemy of youth could still ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... of industry and commerce, that all distinction in them seems to be reduced to a strange colorlessness; while the primordial animal cravings, greedy, earth-born, fumble after their aims across the sad and littered stage of sombre scenery. ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... stood our guide and boatman, his sombre eye steady on the south-by-east. Around the horizon of his countenance there spread a dark and six-days' beard, like a slowly rising thunder-cloud; ever and anon there was a gleam of white teeth, like ...
— The Rudder Grangers Abroad and Other Stories • Frank R. Stockton
... reflections were sombre. I saw my resources all but exhausted, and I began to meditate a journey to Lisbon. If my fortune had been inexhaustible, the Hanoverians might have held me in their silken fetters to the end of my days. It seemed to me as if I loved them more like ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... Miss Abingdon's sombre reflections when her friend, the vicar's wife, came in for a morning call. She thought that Mrs. Wrottesley's brown merino dress and bonnet, and constraining mantle which rendered all movements of the arms ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... scurrying rush of little school-boys from a steep side-street. They ran down the slope, and passed me, going quickly like black blots on the road, yet their laughter was sunlight on the ripple of waters. The Portuguese are always children and are not sombre. Only in their graveyards stand solemn cypresses which rise darkly on the hillside where they bury their dead; but in life they laugh and are merry even after they have children ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... however, are full of poignant episodes. For instance, let us take an incident which occurred in his early boyhood when he found out what sort of man his father really was—a sombre event in the life of any boy, much more so for ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... mists, dark chasms, hidden echoes; but he perceived something of its vastness and immensity; he had broken down the poor frail fences of his soul, and was in contact with reality. He did not doubt that he seemed to the younger generation an elderly and sombre personage, stumbling down the dark descent of life, with youth and brightness behind him; but that descent appeared to himself to be rather an upward-rising road, over dim mountains, the air glowing about him with some far-off sunrise. Poetry, art, religion—they ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... area of the Big Water, but was better worth while when you got there. Her little tract lay beyond the more prosaic reaches that were furnished chiefly in the light green of deciduous trees; it was part of a long stretch thickly set for miles with the dark and sombre green of pines. Our nature-lover had taken, the year before, a neglected and dilapidated old farmhouse and had made it into what her friends and habitues liked to call a bungalow. The house had been put up—in the rustic spirit which ignores all considerations of landscape and outlook—behind ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... murdered his master by casting him down an oubliettes, ever haunted the fatal tower, first as a sleep-walker, then as a restless ghost—moaning and gibbering to himself, and tearing at a walled-up door with bleeding hands. The train of thought thereby suggested was so very sombre, that I preferred returning to my cabin, and climbing into an unfurnished berth, to spending more minutes in that weird company. I never made the man out satisfactorily afterwards. It is possible that he was one of the few who scarcely showed on deck, till we were in sight of land; but rather, ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... (I forget what) to step into the court-yard, as I settled this account; and remember I walk'd down stairs in no small triumph with the conceit of my reasoning.—Beshrew the sombre pencil! said I, vauntingly—for I envy not its powers, which paints the evils of life with so hard and deadly a colouring. The mind sits terrified at the objects she has magnified herself, and blackened: reduce them ...
— A Sentimental Journey • Laurence Sterne
... of about fifty, tall, portly, and imposing, with a massive, strongly marked face and a commanding figure. He was dressed in a sombre yet rich style, in black frock-coat, shining hat, neat brown gaiters, and well-cut pearl-grey trousers. Yet his actions were in absurd contrast to the dignity of his dress and features, for he was running hard, with occasional little ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... now walking down the nave, preceded by the sombre figures with the pot flowers, who were just visible in the rays that reached them through the distant choir screen at their back; while above the grey night sky and stars looked in upon them ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... contradictory chin marring by its prominence the otherwise perfect oval of the face. I wondered if Anthony had as noble a throat as this collarless galabeah left uncovered, reminding myself that I could not at all recall Anthony's throat. Then, as the sombre eyes turned to me, drawn perhaps by my stare, I was stunned, flabbergasted, what you will, by realizing that Anthony himself was looking at me from ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... his party had time to pay a visit to Salt Lake City, connected with Ogden by a branch road; and they spent two hours in this strikingly American town, built on the pattern of other cities of the Union, like a checker-board, "with the sombre sadness of right-angles," as Victor Hugo expresses it. The founder of the City of the Saints could not escape from the taste for symmetry which distinguishes the Anglo-Saxons. In this strange country, where the people are certainly not up to the level of their ...
— Around the World in 80 Days • Jules Verne
... foot of the bed was a small writing-table, with a penny bottle of ink on it. A few coloured prints and engravings —representing, for example, Louis Philippe and his family, and people perishing on a raft—broke the tedium of the walls. The first impression on Sophia's eye was one of sombre splendour. Everything had the air of being richly ornamented, draped, looped, carved, twisted, brocaded into gorgeousness. The dark crimson bed- hangings fell from massive rosettes in majestic folds. The counterpane was covered with lace. The window-curtains had amplitude ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... see nobody, and hid himself from view. Later, he returned to his capital and entered upon a long period of mourning, to the sincerity of which his heartfelt sorrow bore even plainer testimony than his sombre garb of woe. His royal neighbours all sent ambassadors with messages of condolence, and when the ceremonies proper to these occasions were at length over, he proclaimed a period of peace. He released his subjects from military service, and devoted ...
— Old-Time Stories • Charles Perrault
... insubordination, disturbing public rule and private peace. For waving pendants, flowing draperies, brilliant colours, eagles' feathers, herons' plumes, feasts or festivals so splendid in imagination, let naked limbs, scanty, sombre garments to elude discovery by the foe, bits of heath stuck in bonnets if they had them, precarious sustenance, abject humility and all those hardships inseparable from uncultivated tribes and countries be instituted as a ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... crape-veiled women standing, With processions long and winding and the flambeaus of the night, With the countless torches lit, with the silent sea of faces and the unbared heads, With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the sombre faces, With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong and solemn, With all the mournful voices of the dirges poured around the coffin, The dim-lit churches and the shuddering organs—where amid these you journey, With ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... together; they all look very happy, but I think Mrs. Campbell is the most so of any. At a little distance from this last small circle stands our old friend, Girly, now grown beyond all recognition into a pleasing and promising womanhood; and away in the misty background a long-forgotten trio loom out in sombre sullenness; they are Mrs. Hampden, and Fred and the 'solicitous brother.' Fred is a hopeless dyspeptic, who can give his mind to nothing else but his digestion, which unfortunate circumstance frets his new disenchanted parent and provokes his no ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... scene, though sombre and sad, was far from depressing, but they all felt the change. John Hislop seemed to feel it more than all the rest; for besides being deeply religious, he was deeply in love. His nearest and dearest friend, Heney—happy, hilarious Heney—knew, and he swore softly whenever a ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman
... Louis Rey, was very sombre and reserved," says Peytel; "he refused to call me in the morning, to carry my money-chest to my room, to cover the open car when it rained." The Prosecutor disproves this by stating that Rey talked with the inn maids and servants, asked if his master was up, and stood in the inn-yard, ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... popularly believed, had been built on the site of an ancient burial-ground. Every one used to say it was haunted, and the Holkitts had great trouble in getting servants. The appearance of the haunted house did not belie its reputation, for its grey walls, sombre garden, gloomy hall, dark passages and staircase, and sinister-looking attics could not have been more thoroughly suggestive of all kinds of ghostly phenomena. Moreover, the whole atmosphere of the place, no matter how hot and bright the sun, was cold ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... Sombre and rich, the skies; Great glooms, and starry plains. Gently the night wind sighs; Else ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... things in the infinite, with the consequent loss of personality, individuality, and all moral responsibility, had a most depressing effect upon the character of the people who embraced this strange system. This is so manifest that it may be plainly read in the sombre ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... was never sombre. She always seemed to remember, even in her bright ribbons and silks, the days of her girlhood, when half the young men in the county were wild about her. When she moved she wafted towards you a perfume of sweet ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith
... fingers. "Ah, oui! He loves her so well that he will strangle her one of these days when she says a word too much and he is in his sombre mood! Quiet as he is, I would not go too far with him, ce beau monsieur! He will not be ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... Gare du Nord, coming direct from far-off Glencardine, and had driven there in an auto-cab to keep an appointment made by telegram. As he paced the big room, with its dark-green walls, its Turkey carpet, and sombre furniture, his companions regarded him in wonder. They instinctively knew that he had some news of importance to impart. There was one absentee. Until his arrival Goslin refused to ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... odd smile. "A man who is about to die will do many things that would be madness in a man who has life before him," he said. His eyes gazed into his friend's eyes with sombre meaning. "I finished the records ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... je n'ai pas besoin de ta lueur, car je connais ma route! Elle a pu me paraitre sombre au debut, quand mes yeux n'etaient point accoutumes a ses rudes contours; mais, depuis un an, elle est pour moi eblouissante de clarte. On a beau me l'allonger chaque jour, on n'arrivera pas a me l'obscurcir. On a beau y multiplier les ronces et les pierres, apres lesquelles je laisse de ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... lakes has its own character and therefore its own charm. One is bright and friendly, with wooded hills around it, and silver beaches, and red berries of the rowan-tree fringing the shores. Another is sombre and lonely, set in a circle of dark firs and larches, with sighing, trembling reeds along the bank. Another is only a round bowl of crystal water, the colour of an aquamarine, transparent and joyful as the sudden smile on the face of a child. Another is surrounded by fire-scarred ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... been discovered of the same appearance. Some were dyed purple, others painted with the bright colours of the sky and sea, or the shining of the stars, yet others green as grass. Many were exceeding pale, many again exceeding dark and sombre, the whole so ordered that the eye found in these devices every one of the ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... seer himself, sometimes that of one dear to him. This type of prevision is so common in the literature of the subject, and its object is so obvious, that we need hardly cite examples of it; but one or two instances in which the prophetic sight, though clearly useful, was yet of a less sombre character, will prove not uninteresting to the reader. The following is culled from that storehouse of the student of the uncanny, Mrs. Crowe's Night Side of Nature, ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... with clear-eyed frankness. Every subject was proper ground for legitimate study, even the sombre facts of death and burial, and the unknown life beyond. She touches these themes sometimes lightly, sometimes almost humorously, more often with weird and peculiar power; but she is never by any chance frivolous or trivial. And while, as one ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... a rarely gifted mortal, to whom the triple portal Of Music, Art, and Poesy had opened years before, With a look of sombre feeling, depths within his soul revealing, Leaving room for no appealing, he decided o'er and o'er The old, old vexing questions of the why and the ...
— The Wit of Women - Fourth Edition • Kate Sanborn
... for there was a peculiarly sombre frown upon Yussuf's brow, which suggested that he was thinking over Mr Burne's suspicions of the previous evening, and his ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... His voice had grown sombre, and to Jimmie, gazing at him, it seemed that all the sorrows of the world were in his tired grey eyes. "Perhaps ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... apart, and there comes a sudden indrawing of breath from all, for no garden is there now. In its place is an endless wood of great trees; the nearest of them has come close to the window. It is a sombre wood, with splashes of moonshine and of blackness standing ...
— Dear Brutus • J. M. Barrie
... number of the other species of Fagus and of the Winter's Bark, is quite inconsiderable. This beech keeps its leaves throughout the year; but its foliage is of a peculiar brownish-green colour, with a tinge of yellow. As the whole landscape is thus coloured, it has a sombre, dull appearance; nor is it often enlivened by the ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... but they are most sensitive to the stealthy breezes, and betray the passing of a wind that even the tree-tops knew not of. Sometimes it is a breeze unfelt, but the stiff sedges whisper it along a mile of marsh. To the strong wind they bend, showing the silver of their sombre little tassels as fish show the silver of their sides turning in the pathless sea. They are unanimous. A field of tall flowers tosses many ways in one warm gale, like the many lovers of a poet who have a thousand reasons for ...
— The Colour of Life • Alice Meynell
... presented; but those were bright and joyous days, and our school-yard resounded with the merry laugh and frolicsome mirth of childhood; yet they leave not that abiding impression upon the mind that characterizes incidents of a more sombre hue. But we will leave the dear old school house with all its treasured memories that link it with the past, and pursue our way in some other direction. It is hard to stop where so many images crowd upon the mind, and come stealing ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... sweeping martingal, and is surmounted by a gilt scroll, or, as the sailors call it, a fiddle-head. The black stern is ornamented by a group of white figures in bas relief, which give a lively air to the otherwise sombre and vacant expression, and beneath the cabin-windows is painted the name of the ship, and her port of register. The lower masts of this vessel are short and stout, the top-masts are of great height, the extreme points of ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... group I notice some quite new, or freshly planed unpainted white wood, standing beside others grey or even black with age; and there are many, still older from whose surface all the characters have disappeared. Others are lying on the sombre clay. Hundreds stand so loose in the soil that the least breeze ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... the door. Was it the ghost of Madame Richard who stood there pale, cold, and in the sombre garb ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... already. It only remains for me now to get all my people happy as soon as possible. Zany and Chunk 'make up,' and a good deal of their characteristic love-making will be worked in to relieve the rather sombre state of things at this stage. Whately returns with his empty sleeve, more of a hero than ever in his own eyes and his mother's. Miss Lou thinks him strangely thoughtful and considerate in keeping away, as he does, after a few short visits at The ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... out a spiritual vapour, like a cloud, which surrounds one. These are all in different colours, and the colours change with the thoughts we think. Black and purple are the gloomy, morose colours; deep blue and the paler shades show a sombre outlook on life; green is more cheerful, though still serious; yellow and orange show ambition and envy, and red and white are emblematic of all the virtues—red of the noble, martial qualities of man and white of the angelic disposition of woman," he concluded, with a meaning glance at ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... His later writings were incomprehensible. When we were living in England, he passed through the midst of us on one of his aimless, mysterious journeys round the world; and when I was in New York, in 1884, I met him, looking pale, sombre, nervous, but little touched by age. He died a few years later. He conceived the highest admiration for my father's genius, and a deep affection for him personally; but he told me, during our talk, that he was convinced that there was some secret in my father's life which ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... the night, unseen, a single warrior, In sombre harness mailed, Dreaded of man, and surnamed the Destroyer, The rampart wall ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... quivered; his broad brow contracted; his face became as sombre as the skies above them. Some memory of awful bitterness distorted for a moment his features, but he said nothing. Like all strong men, he drove down his emotions to the depths of his heart; thinking perhaps, as simple characters are apt to think, that there was something immodest in unveiling ...
— Adieu • Honore de Balzac
... had refused to accompany him, for it was the hour when she usually sat with Isabel. She glanced at Eustace swiftly as he sat down, half-expecting a message from the sick-room. But he said nothing, merely leaning back in the wicker-chair, and fixing his eyes upon the sombre splendour of endless waters upon which hers had been resting. There was a massive look about him, as of a strong man deliberately bent to some gigantic task. A little tremor went through her as furtively she watched him. His silence, unlike the silences of Scott, was disquieting. ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... street, where death is so gay, so vain, so richly adorned, where the monuments arose amid the foliage of trees perennially green, which they had endeavored, but without success, to render serious and sombre, where the mausolea are pavilions and dining-rooms, in which the inscriptions recall whole narratives of life and even love affairs, there stood spacious inns and sumptuous villas—for instance, those of Arrius Diomed and Cicero. This Arrius Diomed was one of the freedmen ...
— The Wonders of Pompeii • Marc Monnier
... goddesses, Christian virtues, and allegoric gentlefolks, are crowded into every room, as if Mrs. Holman had been in heaven and invited every body she saw. The great apartment is first; painted ceilings, inlaid floors, and unpainted wainscots make every room sombre. The tapestries are fine, but, not fine enough, and there are few portraits. The chapel is charming. The great jet d'eau I like, nor would I remove it; whatever is magnificent of the kind in the time it was done, I would retain, else all gardens and houses wear a tiresome resemblance. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... her sister's head went down again. She could think of nothing to say. "I can't help thinking that our life would be that," Martie went on presently, raising her sombre face to rest it on one hand, her elbows propped on the table. "Everything would be wonderful, just because we love each other so! He writes, ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... inlet with a wall of forest overshadowing it on each side; we enter it, and at a distance of two or three hundred yards a glorious sheet of water bursts upon the view. The scenery of Cayambe is very picturesque. The land, on the two sides visible of the lake, is high, and clothed with sombre woods, varied here and there with a white-washed house, in the middle of a green patch of clearing, belonging to settlers. In striking contrast to these dark, rolling forests, is the vivid, light green and cheerful foliage ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... and artfully arranged that they wore the appearance of study and preparation. This brilliant, resplendent creature, in every respect the opposite to George Grenville, showy where Grenville was solid, fluent where he was formal, glittering and even glowing where he was sober or sombre, fascinating where he was repellent, gracious where he was sullen, and polished where he was rude, was nevertheless destined to share Grenville's hateful task and Grenville's deserved condemnation. Such enthusiasm as Parliament ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... shepherds pipe on oaten straws, or shag-haired satyrs frolic and sleep; and meadows, whose carpets of cowslip and mint are freshened daily by nymphs pouring out gentle streams from crystal urns. Every now and then, huntsmen in green dash through his sombre woods with their hounds in full cry; anglers are seated by still pools, shepherds dance around the May-pole, and shepherdesses gather flowers for garlands. Gloomy caves appear, surrounded by hawthorn and holly that "outdares cold winter's ire," and sheltering ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... Sombre become the skies, the winds of fall Sing dangerously through the hissing grass; Sunlight and clouds in slow procession pass Over the tress, then comes an interval Of utter calm, the air is a morass Of humid ...
— The Five Books of Youth • Robert Hillyer
... the real concerning them, was too exclusively confined to those tragic and terrible traits, of which, in listening to the secret annals of every rude vicinage, the memory is sometimes compelled to receive the impress. Her imagination, which was a spirit more sombre than sunny—more powerful than sportive—found in such traits material whence it wrought creations like Heathcliff, like Earnshaw, like Catherine. Having formed these beings, she did not know what she had done. If the auditor of her work, when read ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... salon, and his sombre eyes passed from the Marquis to Mademoiselle. As they rested upon her some of the sternness seemed to fade from their glance. He found in her a change almost as great as that which she had found in him. The lighthearted, laughing girl of nineteen, who had ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... their dress, habitations, and implements, so picturesque and unique, as well as the gallant gentlemen in the costume of that picturesque age, it seems almost to border on romance. But there is a dark side to the picture. The sombre veil of uncertainty hangs over the fate of two entire colonies, which, if lifted, would consecrate this spot to the extremes of suffering and bloodshed. It was, no doubt, better to have these scenes buried in oblivion, and for each succeeding ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... love as our benefactor, whom we cannot but admire as our superior: it was a sense of frightful anomaly, of putrescence in beauty and splendour, of death in life and life in death, which made the English psychologist-poets savage and sombre, cynical and wrathful and hopeless. The influence is the same on all, and the difference of attitude is slight, and due to individual characters; but the gloom is the same in each of them. In Webster—no mere grisly inventor of Radcliffian horrors, ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... and weary. Around his sombre eyes were chocolate-coloured hollows. His thick raven hair was disordered. He had lost heavily, and, bidding a curt good-bye to the others, he strode off. In a moment I had ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... prelate made matters worse by an arrogant attitude, and afterward spoke of the King, who received him in sombre silence, as "that debaser of coinage, that proud and dumb image that knows nothing but to stare at ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... quite foreign to her hitherto. The little school-teacher had turned shy again and said never a word, but, as he opened the gate to let her pass through, she saw the old, old telltale look in his sombre eyes. Her mother ...
— In Happy Valley • John Fox
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