"Blackness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... minutes later, I was stopped in a dark quiet alley by a hand on the back of my neck. I saw no one. I heard no noise of breathing. In the pitch blackness of the night the hand arrested me. It was like my spine suddenly stiffening to a rod of ice. "Quiet," said a strange voice before I could scream. "Off with those Dutch clothes. Put on these. Off with those sabots." I was in a suit of English ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... all round the ship for a distance of about a couple of hundred yards; but inshore of us the shadow of the island lay jet-black upon the surface of the water, completely hiding all evidence of movement in that direction, even when I attempted to probe the blackness with the night glass. Therefore we were obliged to trust quite as much to our ears as to our eyes for warning of the approach of an enemy; but even they did not help us much, for the island was but a small one, and the thunder of the surf upon ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... as it was dark, for the wind, light all through the preceding twenty hours, had at length fallen away to nothing, and the ship was motionless, save for the slight heave of the swell which, stealing along through the blackness, would occasionally take her under the counter and give her a gentle lift that would cause all her spars to creak and her canvas to rustle with a pattering of reef-points, a jerk and rattle of hemp and chain sheets, and a faint click of cabin doors upon their hooks, the whole accompanied, ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... bush he could see to screen himself. He held his breath and listened. Now he crept forward a foot at a time. Now he advanced swiftly for yards. He worked his way to the right and the left. But nowhere could he see what he was searching for, and no betraying sound came out of the thick blackness. ...
— The Secret Wireless - or, The Spy Hunt of the Camp Brady Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... had set, and almost immediately the darkness descended, as though the light had been turned off at a switch. The earth shrunk to a pool of blackness, and the heavens expanded to a glory of tropical stars. All visible nature contracted to the light thrown by the flickering fires before the tiny white tents. The tatterdemalion crew had, after the curious habit of Africans, cast aside its garments, and sat forth in a bronze ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... as he was speaking, a small cloud appeared on the horizon, and as it approached grew larger, until the heavens were overcast. Then drawing his bow to its utmost tension, he let fly the arrow, which sped up into the gathering blackness, and was lost to view. Presently the sky was illumined with a vivid flash, and peal upon peal of thunder followed in rapid succession. The crowd dispersed, running to their lodges in the greatest confusion; but the great warrior who had brought ...
— Seven and Nine years Among the Camanches and Apaches - An Autobiography • Edwin Eastman
... John of Hainault seized the bridle of King Philip's horse and led him away, led him away from the danger and tumult of the battle-field. Out into the quiet country they rode in silence, with five horsemen only following them. On they journeyed through the blackness of the night and on until they reached Amiens. But of their flight or journey or destination, not one of the victors thought or cared, for the battle-field had become the seat of wild rejoicing ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... speed he lighted his lamp, but the flaring name illuminated only a little space in the brooding, hovering blackness about him. ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... creeper, that give a glimpse and a hint—no more—of a fairy-land of shelter and fountains within. I have seen such palaces stand in quiet and stately parks, as old, as majestic, as finely proportioned as the buildings of Oxford; but the very blackness of the city air, and the drifting smoke of the town, gives that added touch of grimness and mystery that the country airs cannot communicate. And even fairer sights are contained within; those panelled, dark-roofed halls, with their array of portraits gravely and intently regarding the ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... flash of lightning. Bitterest of all was the thought that I must now bid everlasting farewell to this beautiful being I had found in the solitude this lustrous daughter of the Didi—just when I had won her from her shyness—that I must go away into the cursed blackness of death and never know the mystery of her life! It was that which utterly unnerved me, and made my legs tremble under me, and brought great drops of sweat to my forehead, until I thought that the venom was already doing its swift, fatal work in ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... branch of the river), and drew up on the bank. They announced to us then that we were to walk a mile through the woods, to a house. I think no white man, even the most surly of our drivers, would have asked us to do that,—in perfect blackness, the trees wet and dripping,—but would have managed to bring us to some inhabited place. They started off at a rapid gait, and we followed. We could not see their forms; but one carried something white in ...
— Life at Puget Sound: With Sketches of Travel in Washington Territory, British Columbia, Oregon and California • Caroline C. Leighton
... Franciscan;—there are the Black Hussars of the Bandiera della Morte, and there are the Scots Grays whose horses can run upon the rock. But if you ask me, as I would have you ask me, why argent and why sable, how baptized in white like a bride or a novice, and how hooded with blackness like a Judge of the Vehmgericht Tribunal,—I leave these questions with ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... of storm and blackness they crossed the Saranac; dividing in two bodies they crawled unseen, one on each side of the battery. Three hundred British soldiers were sleeping near, only the sentries peered into ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... and the stars winked at her, they were green diamonds that sparkled through chinks in the alder leafage overhead: round dark leaves like coins, and scattered in clusters, like branches of black bloom. Near at hand the river ran in silken blackness, but below the coppice, where it widened into shallows, it went whispering and rippling over a pebbly bottom on its way to the humming thunder of the mill. And in a fir-tree not far off a nightingale was singing, now a string of pearls dropping bead by bead from his throat, ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... conscious of the blackness of his crime, which indeed was of the deepest dye, and that he had never till then experienced the arm of vengeance. He shuddered as the violence of the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 393, October 10, 1829 • Various
... motionless, breathless. A moment; then into the room came Wolfgar. He did not speak. Advancing close to us as we stood transfixed, he jerked an instrument from his belt. It whirred and hummed in his hand. The room around us went black—a barrage of blackness and silence, with ourselves and Wolfgar in a pale glow standing within it as in a cylinder. The isolation-barrage. I had never been within one before, though upon drastic occasion they were ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... herself settling back against the cantle of the saddle. A little later she realized that they were going down the opposite side of the rise, and a moment later they were again on a level. A deeper blackness than they had yet encountered rose on their right, and Sheila correctly decided it to be caused by a stretch of wood that she had observed from the crest of the rise where she had halted her pony for a view of the country. After an interval, during which she debated the wisdom of directing ...
— The Trail to Yesterday • Charles Alden Seltzer
... he climbed the steep step, throwing the candle rays ahead of him into the gloom of the gallery. Not a sound. The silence of death was in the big church.... Muttering to himself, he traversed the long aisle at the top of the gallery, peering down into the vacant seats that edged the blackness below. ...
— Unfinished Portraits - Stories of Musicians and Artists • Jennette Lee
... a great body in the darkness at the mouth of the lean-to. Grasping his rifle, he fired at the vague, threatening shadow, but must have missed, for immediately afterwards he heard the smashing of the underwood as the thing, whatever it was, rushed off into the impenetrable blackness of the forest and ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... man's outward form remained, but all hell was within it. Furious lust, and hate that was like fire, and the loss of all hope and horror that seemed to shriek aloud to the night, though his teeth were shut; and the utter blackness of despair. I am sure he did not see me; he saw nothing that you or I can see, but he saw what I hope we never shall. I do not know when he died; I suppose in an hour, or perhaps two, but when I passed down Ashley Street ...
— The House of Souls • Arthur Machen
... crowd of beauty that has been so profusely lavished on the youthful in this country, she would not have been at all remarked in a large assembly of young American girls. Her face was pleasing nevertheless; and there was a piquant contrast between the raven blackness of her hair the deep blue of her eyes, and the dazzling whiteness of her skin. Her colour, too, was high, and changeful with her emotions. As for teeth, she had a set that one might have travelled weeks to meet with their equals; and, though she seemed ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... and yet in the inky blackness of the room accurate hunting down was difficult. It was like a duel between blind men. Thor was moving uncertainly, pausing from second to second to fix the object ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... They seemed a portent, though in truth they were something less. They found themselves left alone to their private griefs, ruminating regretfully over the golden age that had suddenly ended, gazing into the blackness of a ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... A great blackness settled over the waters. To Anne, always an impressionable girl, it was as though all life had suddenly been obliterated from the face of them. Her hand tightened its grasp on Sara's fingers, for as the vessel plunged along there was a palpable impression that the flotilla, now hurrying ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... Leonard leaned back in his bunk, quite sleepless now. He stared into the blackness, his mind a moving picture show of the last three days. The Englishman was chief actor on this stage, and his disagreeably mixed character puzzled and disturbed the American. Caradoc's language and manners showed him to be a man of ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... middest night, a vast figure rose slowly from the abyss, and its wings threw blackness over the world. High upward to the throne of the discontented star sailed the fearful shape, and the star trembled on his throne when the form stood before him face to face. And the shape said: ...
— The Fallen Star; and, A Dissertation on the Origin of Evil • E. L. Bulwer; and, Lord Brougham
... rude, and perhaps was hurting it; but she did want, she said to herself, to see what secret it carried so carefully hidden; and she found its golden heart. But now, right under her eyes, inside the veil of her hair, in the sweet twilight of whose blackness she could see it perfectly, stood a daisy with its red tip opened wide into a carmine ring, displaying its heart of gold on a platter of silver. She did not at first recognize it as one of those cones come awake, but a moment's ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... that partaketh Of the couch she sheweth to him. Seek of wisdom, and refrain thee From the path whereon she lurketh; She will draw thy vigor from thee, And thy spirit to destruction. There is sin, in all its blackness, Spreading wide its vile infection. Like unto a thief it stealeth Through the crowded lanes and alleys; And appeareth, robed more gaily, Yet as hideous in its purpose, In the dwellings of the lofty, On their walks and promenadings. Here ...
— A Leaf from the Old Forest • J. D. Cossar
... decision came back with a sudden rush, as it were, and thrusting out a foot, I kicked the door so that it swung sharply back to its full extent, and permitted me to walk forward slowly into the aperture of profound blackness beyond. What a queer soft sound my bare feet made on the boards! How the blood sang and ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... plainly that not only the Pope and the ex-Emperor of France will probably disappear this year from the scenes of their glory, but that the Sun, over which a certain dirty mistiness has been stealing for some time past, will be entirely shrouded in the blackness of ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., Issue 31, October 29, 1870 • Various
... them both, and sat brooding, clothed in the blackness that blindness brought when it suddenly loomed before him as the wall between him and his life's desires. The brief instant Claire had been in his arms had made him feel that his life was intolerable without her, and that blindness was the curse of a double living ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... ward's money by lending it to Undy; but that acute gentleman saw clearly that he could not contend against the fact of the property having been fraudulently used; but he saw that he might induce the jury to attach so much guilt to Undy, that Tudor would, as it were, be whitened by the blackness of the other's villany. The judge, he well knew, would blow aside all this froth; but then the judge could ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... against the ever fiercer buffets of the storm, Katherine gave Nelly free rein to pick her own way at her own pace through the blackness. The rain volleyed into her pitilessly, the wind sought furiously to wrest her from the saddle, the lightning cracked open the heavens into ever more fiery chasms, and the thunder rattled and rolled and reverberated as though a thousand battles were waging in the valley. It was as if the earth's ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... to the plantations. Sometimes their feelings were raised to the utmost pitch of horror by the sight of sculls and bones scattered on the ground—a certain indication that the bodies had been devoured by wild beasts; and in other places they saw the blackness of ashes amidst the relics,—the ...
— The Life, Studies, And Works Of Benjamin West, Esq. • John Galt
... except her soft replies to his questions. The western clouds rolled up in great volumes of black and grey, rolling and gathering and spreading at a magnificent rate. The sun was presently hid behind the fringe of this curtain of blackness; by and by the mountains were hid beneath a further fringe of rain; a very thick fringe. Between, the masses of vapour in the sky seemed charging for a tremendous outburst. It had not come yet when the slow going little wagon passed through Crum ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 1 • Susan Warner
... streets; not a light in a window. He left the little town behind, passed the last isolated house on the road, and walked into the greater blackness of a road between tall hedges. He had put on canvas shoes with rubber soles, for the better surprise of Mr. Farrer, and his own progress seemed to partake of a ghostly nature. Every ghost story he had ever heard or read crowded into his memory. For the first time in his experience ...
— Night Watches • W.W. Jacobs
... Kenyon. "Sin has educated Donatello, and elevated him. Is sin, then,—which we deem such a dreadful blackness in the universe,—is it, like sorrow, merely an element of human education, through which we struggle to a higher and purer state than we could otherwise have attained? Did Adam fall, that we might ultimately rise to a far loftier paradise than his?" "O hush!" cried Hilda, shrinking ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... house a small hatch stood open. It led to a narrow iron ladder that ran almost perpendicularly down into the dark depths below. The boys peered into the blackness without being able to ...
— A Voyage with Captain Dynamite • Charles Edward Rich
... the reaches of the pond. Above, the sky's day surface unfolded and receded and dissolved and melted away until, through the pale afterglow, one saw beyond into the infinities. Down by the sluice a dozen lanterns flickered and blinked yellow against the blue-blackness of the night. ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... Heselton's forehead. "This is bad, Rogers. Mighty bad." Nervously, he walked across to the right of the bridge and stood, hands clasped behind his back, staring blankly out at blackness and the scattered stars. "I know there is a ship out there, and I know that a ship simply can't be invisible, ...
— A Matter of Magnitude • Al Sevcik
... alone to say their prayers. It was always very dark with the little red light burning before the altar and two tapers that they lit beneath a statue of the Virgin, old and black and ill-carved by antique hands centuries before. And, in that blackness, they knelt, invisible almost, and still in the black gowns that they put on for prayers, beside a low pillar that gloomed out at their sides and vanished up into the darkness of ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford
... followed the gesture of the Egyptian, and beheld with dismay a vast vapor shooting from the summit of Vesuvius in the form of a gigantic pine-tree; the trunk, blackness—the breaches fire!—a fire that shifted and wavered in its hues with every moment, now fiercely luminous, now of a dull and dying red, that again blazed terrifically ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... having and still have the grippe, the result of it for your Cruchard, is a general lassitude accompanied by a violent (or rather a profound) melancholy. While spitting and coughing beside my fire, I muse over my youth. I dream of all my dead friends, I wallow in blackness! Is it the result of a too great activity for the past eight months, or the radical absence of the feminine element in my life? But I have never felt more abandoned, more empty, more bruised. What you said to me (in your last letter) about ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... began. In the velvet blackness came two white eyes, milky, opalescent, small, far away,—awful eyes, like a dead dream. More beautiful than I can describe, the flakes of white flame moving from the perimeter inward, disappearing in the centre, like a ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... stood in the lee of the donkey-engine house, to the water's edge was a full hundred feet, and yet even so, whenever he stepped out into the open, it was only to be drenched with spray. And out there in the blackness, twenty miles offshore, it would be blowing good; out there on the edge of that bank, in the hollow of the short, high, ugly seas, was a rolling, battered light-ship; as helpless as—well, there was nothing ashore to compare to her helplessness. And when ...
— Wide Courses • James Brendan Connolly
... stairs, slipping his lean fingers lightly along the balusters. He turned to the right at the loop, and I followed him barefooted along a thickly-carpeted corridor. At the end stood a door ajar. And from here we very stealthily and in complete blackness ascended five narrow stairs. Seaton, with immense caution, slowly pushed open a door and we stood together looking into a great pool of duskiness, out of which, lit by the feeble clearness of a night-light, rose a vast ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... popular with us; and will, I fear, find but few purchasers in the richly garnished repertoire of the worthy Colnaghi. Indeed it is a painful, and almost repulsive, subject. Laugier's portrait of Le Vicomte de Chateaubriand exhibits his prevailing error of giving blackness, rather than depth, to his shadows. Black hair, a black cravat, and black collar to the coat—with the lower part of the background almost "gloomy as night"—are not good accessories. This worthy engraver lives at present with his wife, an agreeable and unaffected little woman, up four pair of ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... step continued again, down the short hall. A hand fell on the knob of the door and pressed it slowly open. Against the deeper blackness of the hall beyond, Buck saw a tall figure, hatless. His finger curved about the trigger, and still he did not fire. Even to his hysterical brain it occurred that Dan Barry would be wearing a hat—and moreover the form ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... to betray. His moral insensibility appeared but to be deepened as his gaze was now fixed with rigid intensity on the temple portico. Thus he continued to remain motionless, as if what he saw had petrified him where he stood, when the clouds, which had been closing in deeper and deeper blackness as the morning advanced, and which, still charged with electricity, were gathering to revive the storm of the past night, burst abruptly into a loud peal ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... of putting the best of Robert Louis Stevenson into German, or Kipling's rollicking ballads of soldier life into Spanish, or Walter Pater into Dutch, or Edgar Allan Poe into Russian! The one language common to us all, music, tells as many tales as there are men to hear. Each melody melts into the blackness or the brightness of the listener's soul and becomes a thousand melodies instead of one. What does the moaning monotony of a Korean love-song mean to the westerner, or what does the Swan song mean to the Korean? Only God knows. We can never translate one nation ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... hand in one of hers, and with Mark on the other side walked down the path to the road. The darkness was intense there, because of the gigantic pine-tree which towered above the little house. "Are you there, Paul?" she called through the blackness. The little boy's voice came back, "Yes, with Toucle, we're ahead." The ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... the candle-flame when it vanishes into blackness and what becomes of sound when the great maw of silence digests it. But what science can know the destiny of the pins and pins and pins, and what is the oblivion which swallows that great army of street-walking ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... London, swart and grim, semi-shrouded in a warm close mist of mingled human breath and acrid vapour steaming up from the clammy crowded streets,—London, with a million twinkling lights gleaming sharp upon its native blackness, and looking, to a dreamer's eye, like some gigantic Fortress, built line upon line and tower upon tower,—with huge ramparts raised about it frowningly as though in self-defence against Heaven. Around and above it ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... assist her; the bigotry of patriotism rejected her for her birth,—the scrupulousness of modesty, for her history. The night, that consecrated so many homes and gathered together so many families in innocence and repose, was to her blacker than its own blackness in misery and turpitude; the morning, that radiated gladness over the face of the world, revealed the extent and exaggerated the sense of her own degradation. But the vision of Jesus had alighted upon her; she had seen him speeding on his errands of mercy; she ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... Darkness. Bonnily and bravely they sail away there, but before the blast blows by they'll be wrecked; and red wine and strong brandy will be as rife as dyke-water, and we'll drink the health of bonnie Bell Blackness out of ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... with an arch toss of the head, she turned her great black eyes rogueishly upon me, and said in a half whisper that I must not attempt it again. But I could not resist the magic of her glance, while, together with the cherry-like freshness of her lips, and the raven blackness of those glossy curls that hung so ravishingly over her fair blushing cheeks, discovering a delicately arched brow, and enhancing the sweetness of her oval face, carried me away captive, and made it seem as if heaven had created our loves to flow on in one unhallowed stream of ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... the foreman, like himself was stationed somewhere off there in the blackness, sitting on his pony as immovable as a statue, his straining eyes peering into the night, his ears keyed to catch ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Montana • Frank Gee Patchin
... as he spoke he swung his huge bulk out of the boat and up the bank by the vines that had served him in coming, disappearing from sight and sound swiftly and silently as a great cat. Little and Barry leaned towards each other, seeking to discern features and expressions. It was hopeless in the blackness, but Barry's feelings ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... I saw my mother bending over a little child in my bed in the old house in Oxfordshire where I was born, and then—blackness! ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... sense of being whirled at a terrific speed into some subterranean suck of waters. There was nothing to do but wait. We struck rocks and went rolling, shipping buckets of water at every dip. Then there was a long sickening swoop through utter blackness. It ended abruptly with a ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... the heart, when hope has fled; When vanishes each prospect fair, When the last flickering ray has sped, And naught remains but mute despair; When inky blackness doth enshroud The hopes the heart once held in store, As some tall pine, by great winds bowed, Doth snap, and when the tempest's o'er, Its noble form, magnificent and proud, Doth prostrate lie, nor ever riseth ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... In the blackness of night, the last despairing cry of many expiring souls filled the ears of the survivors, acute with terror, until they, in turn, becoming exhausted, would unresistingly glide into the seething foam, to be swallowed up by ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... time I sat there trying to pierce the blackness of the room beyond the window with my straining eyes, deeply sensitive to a curiosity that had as its basic force the very natural anxiety to know what disposition she had made of the rest of her person in order to ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... vessel that had brought them from Callernish, went silently toward the shore, and up the narrow road leading to the house. It was a square, two-storied substantial building of stone, but the stone had been liberally oiled to keep out the wet, and the blackness thus produced had not a very cheerful look. Then, on this particular evening the scant bushes surrounding the house hung limp and dark in the rain, and amid the prevailing hues of purple, blue-green and blue the bit of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... of his cigar, and grunted irritably. Inside Charing Cross Station business was proceeding as usual. Porters wheeling baggage-trucks moved to and fro like Juggernauts. Belated trains clanked in, glad to get home, while others, less fortunate, crept reluctantly out through the blackness and disappeared into an inferno of detonating fog-signals. For outside the fog still held. The air was cold and raw and tasted coppery. In the street traffic moved at a funeral pace, to the accompaniment of hoarse cries and occasional ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... Always in front of us hovered an archway of frosted silver, moving as we moved, like a pale, elusive rainbow; and when we put on extra speed for a long, straight stretch, poplars carelessly spared by the Boches spouted up on either side of us like geysers. Then, suddenly, across a stretch of blackness palely shone Compiegne, as Venice ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... wildest dream fulfilled in this strange fashion, seemed to be walking in her sleep. She obeyed her father's orders without a word to him or to Angelot, threw on a cloak, and followed them and the Cure down the steep blackness of the winding stairs. At the door her father put out his light, and it was his hand that guided her through the long grass and bushes in the moat, while Angelot gave all his care to the old priest. At the top of the steps, as the four hastily crossed into ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... and uniformly sombre. Far and near, innumerable chimneys sent forth fumes of various density broad-flung jets of steam, coldly white against the murky distance; wan smoke from lime-kilns, wafted in long trails; reek of solid blackness from pits and forges, voluming aloft and far-floated by the ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing
... honorable either to her or to them. She saw that it was all, at no distant day, to have an end, and that when the end should come, her life would practically be closed. When the means by which she had held so many men in her power were exhausted, her power would cease. Into the blackness of that coming night she could not bear to look. It was full of hate, and disappointment, and despair. She knew that there was a taint upon her—the taint that comes to every woman, as certainly ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... self to God without reserve. Though in appearance He leaves us for a time to prove and exercise our faith, yet He never fails us, when our need of Him is the more pressing. One may say with the Scripture, "It is God who bringeth down to the gates of death, and raiseth up again." The blackness and swelling of my nose went away and I believe, had they continued to bleed me, I had been pretty easy. For want of that I grew worse again. The malady fell into my eyes, and inflamed them with such severe pain, that I thought I ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... hot bath fifteen seconds will be sufficient, but if a cooler development is used, or the prints are solarized in the shadows, more time should be allowed. When the deep shadows are solarized, or appear lighter than surrounding parts, a hot and prolonged development is required to obtain sufficient blackness, as they have a tendency to look like brown paper. I have found breathing on solarized shadows useful, as in the presence of slight moisture they begin to print out and become dark before development, getting ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 711, August 17, 1889 • Various
... pangs of the lover are described just as they are described in the case of his [Shakspere's] Orlando—dishevelled hair, blackness under the eyes, disordered dress, a desire for solitude, and the habit of writing the girl's name on every tree—symptoms which are perhaps now regarded as natural, and which many romantic personages have no doubt imitated because they found them in literature, ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... coloured black like the coalfields in an atlas of physical geography, certain races would be signalised by their opaqueness. If such a map were ever compiled, Australia would of necessity be characterised by blackness; such a blackness, indeed, that jet itself would be as snowy white beside it. But why should this lamentable state of things be said of Australians, who claim to be progressive in their ideas and advanced in their ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... swim, Phil lay over on his back, floated and began blinking industriously to get the water out of his eyes. He soon found that he could see once more, though at that moment there was nothing to be seen in the blackness of the night. ...
— The Circus Boys On the Mississippi • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... and murder him under the pretence of sheltering him from the storm and giving him a hearty welcome at his table? Who could believe that even devils in human shape could cut the throats of two traveling strangers to obtain two watches, $80 and a pair of saddle-bags? I shudder at the blackness of the crime. It occurred only yesterday, and we are at this moment near the spot where the horrid deed was committed. Two other murders have lately been committed near this place. A stranger was found hung on a tree and a traveler was murdered near Shawneetown ...
— Narrative of Richard Lee Mason in the Pioneer West, 1819 • Richard Lee Mason
... be far from La Dorada now,' said Toffy, steering between the lines of stakes; 'but I can't see any signs of the steamer in this blackness.' ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... my way on Till I felt where the foldskirts fly open. Then once more I 20 prayed, And opened the foldskirts and entered, and was not afraid But spoke, "Here is David, thy servant!" And no voice replied. At the first I saw naught but the blackness; but soon I descried A something more black than the blackness—the vast, the upright Main prop which sustains the pavilion; and slow into sight 25 Grew a figure against it, gigantic and blackest of all. Then a sunbeam, that burst ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... poetry, yet with a pathos infinitely deeper, our Milton makes Love the child of Loneliness:[2] a parentage evinced by the terrible melancholy of Love when he cannot find his proper object, and the blank desolation and despair of the frightful void and blackness left behind, when he has lost it. But now, it is just this intolerable loneliness which makes him idealise the commonplace, and see all things in the light of his own yearning, creating for himself visions of unimaginable happiness, ...
— Bubbles of the Foam • Unknown
... uncanny, yet the pleasure in mere noise and dancing is childish and harmless. The picture is imposing and beautiful in its simplicity, gruesome in its wildness and sensuality, and splendid with the red lights which play on the shining, naked bodies. In the blackness of the night nothing is visible but that red-lit group of two or three hundred men, careless of to-morrow, given up entirely to the pleasure of the moment. The spectacle lasts all night, and the crowd becomes more and more wrought up, the leaps ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... further one, with its apse behind. The image of St. Pancras himself stood against a pillar with the light from the lamp beneath flickering against his feet. But Christopher's eyes soon came back to the centre, beyond the screen, where a row of blackness on either side in the stalls, marked where the monks rested back, and where he would soon be resting with them. There were candles lighted at sparse intervals along the book-rests, that shone up into ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... in those few minutes and Thomson found himself in the street again. He guided his way by the railings into Whitehall. The blackness seemed to him to be now less impenetrable. Looking fixedly eastward he seemed to be conscious of some faint lightening in the sky. He heard the rumbling of carts in the road, the horses mostly being led by their drivers. Here and there, ...
— The Kingdom of the Blind • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... collar of her gray tweed coat, painfully climbed out—the muscles of her back racking—and examined the state of the rear wheels. They were buried to the axle; in front of them the mud bulked in solid, shiny blackness. She took out her jack and chains. It was too late. There was no room to get the jack under the axle. She remembered from the narratives of motoring friends that brush in mud gave a firmer surface for ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... races; lured on to a career of sacrifice and contempt. If he could only keep the hope that had hallowed its sufferings. But now it was a viper—not a divine hope—it had nourished in its bosom. He felt so lonely; a great stretch of blackness, a barren mere, a gaunt cliff on a frozen sea, a pine on a mountain. To be done with it all—the sighs and the sobs and the tears, the heart-sinking, the dull dragging days of wretchedness and the nights of pain. How ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... accrue to the venerable—solidly seated or even throned, hooded and draped and tucked-in, with big protective protrusive ears to her chair which helped it to the effect of a shrine, and a large face in which the odd blackness of eyebrow and of a couple of other touches suggested the conventional marks of a painted image. She signified her wants as divinities do, for I recover from her presence neither sound nor stir, remembering of her only that, as described ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... pausing for a while to listen for sounds of pursuit, and at last, with minds relieved, if not quite certain, plodded on into the obscurity. They had entered, it seemed, an aisle of a forest which stretched, darkly impenetrable, on either side. Before them, blackness, darkness within dark, like a cave, a smell of dampness like a dungeon. The sky lightened for a moment and they saw the shape of leaves and tree fronds far above them like a pattern on a carpet—a pattern which changed ...
— Madcap • George Gibbs
... foreground the solemn trees of Snakes Island, one great branch stretching upward, bare and moveless, from the side, like an arm raised to heaven in wonder or in menace towards the house; the lake, in part swept by the icy splendour of the moon, trembling with a dazzling glimmer, and farther off lost in blackness; the Fells rising from a base of gloom, into ribs and peaks white with snow, and looking against the pale sky, thin and transparent as a haze. Right across to the storied woods of Cloostedd, and the old domains of the ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 3 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... without waiting for an answer. When Vedie came in, fifteen minutes later, to clear the table, she found her mistress pale and moist with perspiration, in spite of the season. Flore felt like a woman who had fallen to the bottom of a precipice; the future loomed black before her; and on its blackness, in the far distance, were shapes of monstrous things, indistinctly perceptible, and terrifying. She felt the damp chill of vaults, instinctive fear of the man crushed her; and yet a voice cried in her ear that she deserved to have ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... gloomily, there was a low muttering of thunder, and dense black masses of cloud rose heavily behind the broken peaks. At first they were gayly fringed with silver by the afternoon sun, but soon the thick blackness overspread the whole sky, and the desert around us was wrapped in deep gloom. I scarcely heeded it at the time, but now I cannot but feel that there was an awful sublimity in the hoarse murmuring of the thunder, in the somber shadows ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... sentimental perplexities. But they only slumbered, and they were sharply awakened. The weather was fine, and the two young men always sat together upon deck late into the evening. One night, toward the last, they were at the stern of the great ship, watching her grind the solid blackness of the ocean into phosphorescent foam. They talked on these occasions of everything conceivable, and had the air of having no secrets from each other. But it was on Roderick's conscience that this air ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... moment it had caught fire. Licking up the curl, the flame gradually leaped from one piece of wood to another until the entire handful was ablaze. The dancing light played upon the three faces and sent a glow out into the surrounding blackness. Harry deposited the burning shavings upon the floor, where the fire was soon transmitted to the larger piece of wood ...
— Boy Scouts Mysterious Signal - or Perils of the Black Bear Patrol • G. Harvey Ralphson
... stage of her progress, and whilst the agonizing question seemed yet as indeterminate as ever, Kate's struggle with despair, which had been greatly soothed by the fervor of her prayer, revolved upon her in deadlier blackness. All turned, she saw, upon a race against time, and the arrears of the road; and she, poor thing! how little qualified could she be, in such a condition, for a race of any kind; and against two such obstinate brutes as time and space! This hour of the progress, this noontide of Kate's struggle, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... to look out of the window, staring vainly into blackness between the parted curtains. As she turned back, passing the writing-table, she noticed that Cicely's irruption had made her forget to post her letters—an unusual oversight. A glance at the clock told her that she was not too late for the mail—reminding ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... the grief that ye may not remove the disgrace, That brands with the blackness of hell all your race; 'Tis the sorrow that nothing may cleanse ye of shame, That has wrought us to madness, and filled ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... with reality amid rending and shattering sounds that lingered dimly. Blackness engulfed him ...
— Flamedown • Horace Brown Fyfe
... just turned to go when the sound of a man's heavy, measured footsteps, approaching from the opposite direction, fell upon her ear. She looked up half in dread, and strained her eyes out into the blackness of the night. It was too dark to see anything but the outline of a man's figure wrapped in a large cloak, coming slowly on toward her. As the man drew near she recognized the well-known figure, air and gait; she had of the identity. ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... took her basket again on her arm, came forth from her rock, and resumed the climb. She was obliged to make a good deal of noise, for it was too dark and uncomfortable to enable her to choose her steps well, Up above, the Burghers must have heard her plainly, though none but a keen eye would pick the blackness of her shape from the bosom of the night. The summit and the foot of the hill were alive with the spitting of the guns, and all the while the unknown sharpshooter searched about her for her life with clever plunging shots that flicked the dirt up. ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... was something distinctly eerie in the absolute darkness in which he found himself. He stretched out a hand and felt for the nearest wall like a blind man, groped his way to the door and opened it. But the other room was also in pitchy blackness. ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... swiftly pulled, passed them in the darkness, evidently coming from the shore to which they were being taken: it, too, carried no light. Nor were there any lights on the shore itself; all there was in utter blackness. They were on the shingle within a quarter of an hour; within a minute or two the yachtsmen had helped all three on to the beach, had carried up certain boxes and packages which had been placed in the boat, had set down ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... and with the day comes "a hope" but during the blackness I had "a suffer"— I read until two—five hours—and then slept until five when the middle man who had slept on my shoulder all night left the train and the second one to whom Bernardi was so polite left me alone and had the porter fit me up a bed so that I slept until seven again— Then ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... took advantage of the distractions among the English, and made an attempt to recover Boulogne and that territory which Henry VIII. had conquered from France, On other pretences, he assembled an army, and falling suddenly upon the Boulonnois, took the castles of Sellaque, Blackness, and Ambleteuse, though well supplied with garrisons, ammunition, and provisions.[*] He endeavored to surprise Boulenberg, and was repulsed; but the garrison, not thinking the place tenable after the loss of the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... towards the sky, but there seemed to be no sky, no moon, and no stars, only a vaporous blackness that came ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... Abounding to the Chief of Sinners," from the pen of the author of "Pilgrim's Progress." It is the record of a journey more terrible than that of the ideal Pilgrim; "truth stranger than fiction;" the painful upward struggling of a spirit from the blackness of despair and blasphemy, into the high, pure air of Hope and Faith. More earnest words were never written. It is the entire unveiling of a human heart, the tearing off of the fig-leaf covering of its sin. The voice which speaks ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... that he was now about to die, their minds confused, their eyes bedimmed, as if they saw before them nought but blackness, with hands conjoined, spake thus to Buddha: "Buddha is leaving now the pain of birth and death, and entering on the eternal joy of rest; doubtless we ought to rejoice thereat. Even as when a house is burnt a man rejoices if his friends are saved from out the flames; the gods! ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... on the figurative terms relating to beauty shows that the hair should be black, abundant, and wavy, the eyebrows dark and arched. The eyelashes also must be dark, and like arrows from the bow of the eyebrows. There is, however, no insistence on the blackness of the eyes. We hear of four varieties of eye: the dark-gray eye (or narcissus eye); the narrow, elongated eye of Turkish beauties; the languishing, or love-intoxicated, eye; and the wine-colored eye. Much stress is laid on the quality of brilliancy. The face is sometimes ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... of Hyssop, from one to two drops [279] should be the dose. Pliny said: "Hyssop mixed with figs, purges; with honey, vomits." If the herb be steeped in boiling water and applied hot to the part, it will quickly remove the blackness consequent upon a bruise or blow, especially in the case of "black" ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... day found us approaching the Lone City. We did not need to surmise now that Tao would be warned, for far away on the horizon ahead we saw the beams from his great projectors mounting up into the blackness of the sky. Some four miles from the Lone City the river we were ascending swept off to the right. This was its closest point to the city, and here we disembarked. There were several docks and a few houses, but we found them ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... smooth black canal between two steep white banks; and the glassy water seems momentarily stiffening into the solider blackness of ice. Here and there thin films are already formed over it, and are being constantly broken apart by the treacherous current; a flake a foot square is jerked away and goes sliding beneath the slight transparent surface till it reappears below. The same ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... always goes with blackness. Very good people indeed, you will notice, dress altogether in black, even to gloves and neckties, and they will probably take to black shirts before long. Medium goods indulge in light trousers on week-days, and some of them even go so ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... and were congratulating ourselves on our haven of safety when Ping! Ping! again from our rear came the messages from a sniper hidden there. In glancing back over my shoulder I noticed in the pitchy blackness the flash of a rifle simultaneously with the report, and it seemed to come from a haystack about 200 ...
— S.O.S. Stand to! • Reginald Grant
... fly thy hissing rout, Thy wake is followed by turmoil and din, Blackness and darkness track thy course without, And fire and groans ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... the northern hills begin with the basalt buttresses of Antrim and the granite ribs of Down, and pass through northern Ulster and Connacht to the headlands of Mayo and Galway. Their rear is held by the Donegal ranges, keeping guard against the blackness of the ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... beaches and mountain tops?), and, what was more to my purpose, was open on three sides. I passed a good deal of time there, first and last, and once it sheltered me from a drenching shower of an hour or two. The lightning was vivid, and the rain fell in sheets. In the midst of the blackness and commotion, a single tern, ghostly white, flew past, and toward the close a bunch of sanderlings came down the edge of the breakers, still looking for something to eat. The only other living things in sight were two young fellows, who had improved the ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... wandered free, like a blessed spirit invisible, while Prothero's brain agonized and journalized as Laura said. There was no compromise this time, no propitiation, no playing with the beautiful prose of his occasional essays. He plunged from his heavenly height sheer into the worst blackness of the pit; he contorted himself there in his obscure creation of paragraphs and columns. His spirit writhed like a fine flame, trammelled and tortured by the grossness of the stuff it kindled, and the more it writhed the more he piled on the paragraphs and columns. He seemed, Laura said, to take ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... The explosions of the engine, muffled though they were, seemed like rifle shots to ears newly accustomed to the silences of the night. But the speed of the motor increased rapidly, and she felt the damp of the river fog brushing her cheek. She could see nothing though she peered into the blackness eagerly. The car was rushing to destruction for all that she knew, yet Karl was driving straight and hard for the entrance of the bridge. Marishka saw the dim gleam of a lantern, heard a hoarse shout, and then the sound of shots lost in the crashing of the timbers ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... mood, and he turned his wheel towards the Sykes homestead once more. The motif was still as far beyond his grasp as ever; but there were other things in life besides elusive motifs. The increasing blackness above his head was one of them; his hunger was another, and he quickened his pace. His piano might be awaiting him in mute reproach; but then, so did Eulaly's doughnuts await him, and there was no reproach in those, at least, not until ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... in silence and were peering into the blackness of the night whence the sound apparently came. Anderson thought he saw a figure emerge from behind a tree far off in the distance and he immediately gave chase, opening fire as he did so. Several times he fired into ...
— The Loyalist - A Story of the American Revolution • James Francis Barrett
... just the thing, only it needs something to relieve its blackness," said Mrs. Montague, while she mentally wondered at the richness of ...
— Mona • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... for 't. Would it were mine again: I had been where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest. Nay; there will be no rest for me. I am an apostate—a castaway—the devil that seduced me hath said it again and again—for whom is reserved the blackness of darkness, and the noisome pit for ever! But as long, look thee, as I keep this gold, I die not. No! though twice ten thousand were on my track; for I sold my grave to a doomed one; nor, till I buy another with the ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... in midsummer a man waking from a dreamless sleep in a forest lifted his head from the earth, and staring a few moments into the blackness, said: "Catherine Larue." He said nothing more; no reason was known to him why he ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... silence in the room. Jack stood by the chimney-piece, his hands upraised to rest upon its lofty shelf, his head dropped forward, and his eyes fixed on the empty blackness below. ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner
... was a loud explosion and the ship seemed to split in two, a blaze of red fire stretching high into the heavens from the middle of the vessel as it did so. Then blackness enveloped it again and the two parts of the ship fell back into the water with a hiss like that of a thousand serpents. The first German ...
— The Boy Allies with the Victorious Fleets - The Fall of the German Navy • Robert L. Drake
... and Paulina felt a momentary terror creep over her as she looked into the massy blackness of the dark alleys which ran up into the woods, forced into deeper shade under the glare of the lamps from the encampment. She now reflected with some alarm that the forest commenced at this point, stretching away (as she had been ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... he could do. He went to a few homes he knew, he went to the hospital to ask after the injured, he went to the morgue. At midnight the fire, like an evil thing, drew him back, and he encountered only a steamy blackness lit by the search-light of the engine. There was still the insistent throbbing. And then he thought of his mother and her fears, and sped swiftly up the street, over deserted Lexington Avenue, and up the lamp-lit block. Already ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... almond grove loomed up, casting a denser shade upon the surrounding blackness. The Count hastened his steps and in a few seconds stood among the trees. As he paused the figure of a man emerged from behind a huge fragment of rock and thus ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... said that the original copper plates of his works were captured by a British man-of-war during the Napoleonic conflict. This probably accounts for the dissemination of so many revamped and coarsely executed versions of his compositions. His besetting fault was a tendency toward an Egyptian blackness in his composition. Fond of strong contrasts as was John Martin, he is, at times, as great a sinner in the handling of his blacks. An experimenter of audacity, Piranesi's mastery of the technique of etching has seldom been equalled, and even in his inferior work the skilful printing ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... finger at the base where it joins the hand, as I thought there might be something in his story of the poison. Indeed, as I found afterwards on dissection, and can show you, for I have the thing in spirits, there was, for the blackness of which he spoke, a kind of mortification, I presume, had crept almost to the joint, though the flesh beyond was healthy enough. Certainly that Kalubi was a plucky fellow. He sat like a rock and never even winced. Indeed, when he saw that the flesh was sound he uttered a great sigh of relief. ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... valve from the air belt in order to help my sinking, and jumped overboard, feet foremost—for we hadn't a ladder. I left the boat pitching, and all of them staring down into the water after me, as my head sank down into the weeds and blackness that lay about the mast. I suppose nobody, not the most cautious chap in the world, would have bothered about a lookout at such a desolate place. It ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... ahead, trying to determine where the road led to. But all they could see was the blackness of the forest, and the roadway seemed to grow rougher and more perilous ...
— The Rover Boys on a Hunt - or The Mysterious House in the Woods • Arthur M. Winfield (Edward Stratemeyer)
... through the inferno of darkness stopped, as the rider below considered the latest move of the horseman above. They were so near that Judith could hear the labored breathing of the sweating horse. The blackness of the night had become a tangible thing. The towering mountains were one piece with the gaping precipice, the trail, the scrub pines, the gauntlet on her hand. The horse below resumed its stumbling ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... judgments; and whoever passed the club doors enjoyed already some of the immunities of the tomb. They drank to each other's memories, and to those of notable suicides in the past. They compared and developed their different views of death - some declaring that it was no more than blackness and cessation; others full of a hope that that very night they should be scaling the stars and commencing with the ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... entrance to that fiery furnace, in which the well-known three holy men had once intoned their song of praise; and the chimney above all, standing threateningly upright, with its wreath of pine soot at its mouth, which seemed to lead down into blackness ...
— Dame Care • Hermann Sudermann
... grace, Charles Archfield performed his devoir seriously, his little wife frisked with childish glee, evidently quite untaught, but Peregrine's light narrow feet sprang, pointed themselves, and bounded with trained agility, set off by the tight blackness of his suit. He was like one of the grotesque figures shaped in black paper, or as Sir Philip, looking in from the dining-parlour, observed, "like a light- ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the gulf surrounding the plateau on which the palace stood. All the way around that gulf a sheet of flame seemed to leap upward through smoke, and then, paralyzed, helpless, hypnotized by the spectacle, they saw the plateau and the palace sink and disappear into the blackness of a great void. Then, like a black funeral pall, the smoke rolled up about them and shut off ...
— Frank Merriwell Down South • Burt L. Standish
... pleasing in one part as dark and gloomy and terrible in another. The poisoned chalice, the glittering dagger suspended over the head of the sleeper; wizards and phantoms with hideous masks, those half dim shadows, more terrific than the brightness of flame or the blackness of night; these, and such as these, he had made the companions of his more pleasing pictures. No sooner had the king entered the room than a cold shiver seemed to pass through him, and on Fouquet asking him the cause of it, the king replied, ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... chal—imagines he is right in everything he says and does, and he ought to have perfect liberty to go anywhere or do anything. Some have attempted to paint him white, and in doing so have worked up the blackness from underneath, and presented to us a character which excites a feeling in our notions—a kind of go-between, akin to sympathy and disgust. Not a few have thrown round the Gipsy an enchanting, bewitching halo, which an inspection has ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... man than she had supposed, but otherwise he was like her first impression of him, striking because of his colouring; the red and white of his complexion, which was unusually clear for a man, and the lightness of his grey-green eyes being in peculiar contrast to the blackness of his hair. She noticed again, too, that the expression of his face when he smiled was not altogether agreeable, because his teeth were too far apart; and she also thought his finely-formed hands would have looked better had they not been so ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... himself without any teacher. Until the four rules are learned no teacher can be of any use to him; and that is why "the Masters" are referred to in the way they are. No real masters, whether adepts in power, in love, or in blackness, can affect a man till these ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... knowledge of a certain thing Whereof he had not wist until that hour— To wit, that two contending spirits had power Over his spirit, ruling him with sway Altern; as 'twere dominion now of Day And now of Dark; for one was of the light, And one was of the blackness of the night. ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... was never finished, for at that moment the door of the vehicle was suddenly wrenched open, and with a piercing cry Faynie sprang out into the raging storm and the inky blackness of the night. ...
— Mischievous Maid Faynie • Laura Jean Libbey
... lad's elbow, a threepenny-bit from between another's neck and collar, half a crown from another's hair, and always repeating in that flute-like voice of hers "Well, this is rather queer!" Hither and thither she fared, her neck and arms gleaming white from the luminous blackness of her dress, in the luminous blueness of the night. At a distance, she might have been a wraith; or a breeze made visible; a vagrom breeze, warm and delicate, ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... blackness came rushing down upon us, an angry ridge of foam before it—the white ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... thwart me in this great revenge; But rather come with large propitious eyes Smiling encouragement with ancient looks! Ye sages whose pale, melancholy orbs Gaze through the darkness of a thousand years, Oh, pierce the solid blackness of to-day, And fire anew this crucible of thought Until my soul flames up to the result! (He ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... which lies beyond all things that men know. And he came to the dark country where there was no sunshine nor spring, but it was always dreary winter; where mountains were piled up like blocks of ice, and where great caverns yawned hungrily in blackness. And this was Jotunheim, the land of ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... or a murderer; she would not have felt any fear if she had been told that her last hour was come. She looked out unceasingly into the darkness, at the waving shadows, at the flitting specks which stood out the more clearly in the blackness of the night, at the rings of changing colour which ...
— The Precipice • Ivan Goncharov
... so like that depicted in the elements about us; a patch of blue here, and a streak of blackness stealing up there to cover it. A glint of gold there and a flurry of smoke almost upon it. So with life: brightness is so closely followed by shadows that gloom and glow become inseparable. Perhaps the contrasts save us from the blinding glare of extremes; it may be well to have even ...
— Dorothy Dale • Margaret Penrose
... months at least since he had died in one of the Grecian islands. The full weeds of a mourning widow would ill have befitted her condition of mind, or her immediate purpose. But yet there was a speciality of blackness in her garments which told him that she had dressed herself with a purpose as of mourning. "Mother," he said to her in the train, "you are in mourning,—as for a friend?" Then when she paused he asked again, "May I not be told for whom it is done? ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... things was not to be borne. It was clear that life, for Canadian Reformers, would very soon be not worth living. They despaired of the future, which, to their depressed vision, seemed to be overhung by a sky of unrelieved blackness. Their despair was accompanied by a smarting sense of defeat and injustice proportionate to the circumstances. Such feelings were not confined to defeated candidates and their immediate friends, but were participated in by Reformers generally. Some of them began to weigh the advantages ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... defend you, I had threatened the life of my father. When, on the morrow, without addressing me a word of reproach, he showed me this letter—this letter, which in every line revealed the blackness of your heart, I could only fall on my knees and ask for pardon. Since that day I have been pursued by unceasing remorse. Soon I left Germany on a long journey; then commenced the penance which I imposed upon myself. It will only finish with ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... earthly size. The starry Universe was vast beyond his conception. And in a second now, that abruptly was altered. He conceived the vehicle as of actuality it was—a globe as large as the ball of Saturn itself! And simultaneously he envisaged the present reality of Saturn. Out in the inky blackness it hung—not a giant ringed world millions of miles away, but only a little ringed ball no bigger than the spaceship—a ringed ball only eight or ten times as big as Lee himself. It hung there for an instant beside them—only a mile or so away perhaps. And as it went past, with both distance and ...
— The World Beyond • Raymond King Cummings
... repair, he left them and went to the window. He stood there for some time, staring at the blackness that represented the wall of ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... were close by and could pierce the gloom, and there at the foot of the cross, beside the cairn of stones that helped to support it, was a little huddled bit of blackness. It moved as they looked, and they knew the voice that came ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... chance. You cannot take a child from a mother in this way. I tell you, if you will only help me I can crawl back up the road that I've traveled. I was not always like this. There was another life, before—before—Oh, since then there have been years of blackness, and hunger, and cold and—worse! But I never dragged the boy into it. Look ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber |
